OpenAI has reportedly generated about $5.7 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2026, marking one of the strongest quarters yet for the ChatGPT maker. The growth was driven by rising demand for ChatGPT subscriptions, enterprise AI tools, developer APIs, and especially coding products like Codex, which have seen rapid adoption among software teams and large businesses, reports The Information.
The Sam Altman-led firm is now reportedly generating around $2 billion in monthly revenue, while also expanding into newer areas like AI-powered advertising inside ChatGPT. The latest numbers put the ChatGPT maker around $1 billion ahead of Anthropic, which reportedly generated around $4.8 billion during the same period.
A major contributor to the company’s growth has been its expanding AI coding ecosystem. Products like Codex and newer autonomous coding tools are becoming increasingly important as businesses look for ways to improve developer productivity and reduce engineering costs. AI-powered coding assistants are now considered one of the most commercially valuable segments in the AI industry because they can automate repetitive programming tasks, generate production-ready code, debug applications, write documentation, and assist with infrastructure management. OpenAI has been aggressively competing in this market against products like Anthropic’s Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Google’s Gemini coding systems, and others.
The company’s API business has also emerged as a critical revenue engine. Thousands of startups and enterprise software providers now rely on OpenAI models as foundational infrastructure for AI-powered applications instead of building their own large language models.
The ChatGPT maker’s rapid financial expansion comes despite huge operating costs associated with training and running advanced AI systems. The company continues to spend heavily on GPUs, cloud infrastructure, data centers, and next-generation model development as competition intensifies across the AI sector. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s most recent $122 billion funding round in March valued the company at around $852 billion, making it one of the world’s most valuable private technology firms.
However, at the same time, Anthropic is emerging as OpenAI’s strongest commercial challenger. Founded by former OpenAI researchers, the company reportedly expects its second-quarter revenue to nearly double to around $11 billion while projecting about $600 million in profit. The profitability forecast is particularly notable because most frontier AI companies remain deeply unprofitable due to massive infrastructure and training expenses.
Anthropic’s growth trajectory has accelerated sharply over the past year. Reports indicate the company’s annualised revenue has climbed to about $45 billion, overtaking OpenAI’s reported annualised revenue figure of around $25 billion. The jump is especially dramatic considering Anthropic’s annualised revenue reportedly stood near $9 billion at the end of last year. Most importantly, investors’ interest in the company has surged along with that growth. Recent reports indicated that Anthropic had agreed to terms for a new $30 billion fundraising round that could value the company at around $900 billion – potentially surpassing OpenAI’s latest valuation. Notably, Anthropic had previously been valued at around $380 billion following another major funding round completed in February.
The Tech Portal is published by Blue Box Media Private Limited. Our investors have no influence over our reporting. Read our full Ownership and Funding Disclosure →
Ashutosh is a Senior Writer at The Tech Portal, largely reporting on new tech, and intersection of technology and business. Ashutosh’s career spans across nearly a decade of technology writing across multiple platforms and languages.
