OpenAI surpasses $25 billion in revenue and eyes a 2026 IPO

Five years ago, OpenAI was a research lab that charged nothing for its models and was not sure how it would make money. Today it is pulling in more than $25 billion in annualized revenue and is reportedly taking early steps toward going public, potentially before the end of 2026. That arc is worth pausing on. No software company in history has scaled revenue this fast in its first few years of commercial operation.

The $25 billion figure is annualized, which means it extrapolates current monthly run-rate rather than counting completed annual revenue. Still, the underlying monthly numbers that produce that figure are real, and they have been climbing steeply since ChatGPT's paid tiers launched and the API gained traction with enterprise customers.

Where the revenue is actually coming from

OpenAI's revenue splits across three main channels. ChatGPT subscriptions, which include the $20 per month Plus plan and the $30 per month Team tier, account for a meaningful share. The API, used by developers and enterprises to build products on top of GPT-4o and o-series models, is the other large bucket. Then there are direct enterprise contracts, where large organizations pay for dedicated access, custom fine-tuning, and compliance features. Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service also routes commercial volume back to OpenAI through their partnership agreement.

The enterprise segment has grown faster than most analysts expected in 2024. Companies that started with small internal pilots in 2023 signed broader contracts in 2024 and 2025 as they moved from experimentation to production deployment. Legal, finance, and customer support have been the highest-adoption verticals so far.

Anthropic is not far behind

Anthropic is approaching $19 billion in annualized revenue. That number would have seemed implausible for a four-year-old AI safety company in 2022, and it now makes Anthropic one of the fastest-growing private software companies operating today. The gap between OpenAI and Anthropic is real but smaller than the public narrative often suggests. Anthropic has benefited from large cloud commitments from Google and Amazon, both of which have invested billions and distribute Claude models through their own cloud platforms.

The competition between the two companies has also driven faster product iteration than either would likely have managed alone. OpenAI shipped o3 and GPT-4o upgrades at a pace that would have been unusual even two years ago, partly because Anthropic's Claude 3.5 and Claude 3.7 releases kept pressure on benchmarks that enterprise buyers actually care about.

The IPO question and what it would require

OpenAI going public in late 2026 would be one of the larger technology listings in recent memory. The company's last private valuation was $157 billion following a fundraising round in early 2025. Public market investors would almost certainly apply a different lens, scrutinizing burn rate, the cost of training frontier models, and the durability of enterprise contracts when those contracts come up for renewal.

There is also the structural question. OpenAI spent years operating as a capped-profit company under a nonprofit parent, a structure that complicated how equity worked. In early 2025, the company announced it was restructuring toward a more conventional for-profit model, which cleared one of the main technical barriers to a public listing. Whether that restructuring satisfies the legal requirements for an IPO is still being worked through with advisors.

Timing matters too. The IPO market for tech companies has been selective since 2022. Several high-profile listings underperformed expectations between 2023 and 2025. OpenAI would want to list into a window where public market appetite for growth-stage tech is reasonably strong, which is partly why late 2026 gets mentioned rather than mid-year.

What these revenue figures mean for the broader AI market

Combined, OpenAI and Anthropic are on track to generate over $44 billion in annualized revenue in 2026. That figure does not include Google's Gemini-related revenue, Mistral, Cohere, or the dozens of specialized AI companies operating in narrower verticals. The total addressable market for AI model access has expanded far beyond what most market forecasts predicted even two years ago.

For enterprise software buyers, the revenue scale signals something practical: these companies are not going anywhere. A Fortune 500 company signing a multi-year contract with OpenAI or Anthropic today is not making a bet on an unproven startup. The financial durability argument, which was a real concern in 2023, has largely been answered by the numbers.

OpenAI's CFO Sarah Friar, who joined from Nextdoor in late 2024, has been the most visible signal that the company is preparing for public market scrutiny. Friar has a track record of taking companies through the financial discipline required for an IPO, and her hire was widely read as preparation for exactly that process.