OpenAI is facing steep financial losses even as it seeks fresh capital and considers a public listing, while its rapidly rising rival Anthropic is forecasting aggressive revenue growth in the coming years. According to reporting in The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI recorded a $12 billion loss last quarter, accompanied by an average cash burn of $1.25 billion over the past two quarters. The spending reflects heavy investment in data centers, advanced training clusters and research, as the company pushes to expand commercial adoption of its AI products.
CEO Sam Altman has projected revenue of $13 billion this year and maintains a target of $100 billion by 2027. The company is also positioning itself as the first artificial-intelligence firm that could achieve a public valuation exceeding $1 trillion, supported by deep integration with Microsoft, which holds a 27% stake in the company and deploys ChatGPT-based models across its product suite.
Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI researchers, is advancing a different competitive path. The company's Claude AI assistant has gained traction among corporate clients, particularly in productivity and enterprise safety contexts. Amazon has invested $8 billion in Anthropic and Alphabet has contributed $3 billion, bolstering both financing capacity and cloud access. The influx has helped strengthen quarterly results and accelerate business development.
In an interview with The Information, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei projected that the company could reach $70 billion in revenue and $17 billion in cash flow by 2028, based on expanding commercial deployments. The company aims to reach $9 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of this year and forecasts $20 billion to $26 billion next year. Anthropic expects to generate $3.8 billion in API-related revenue, compared with OpenAI's projection of $1.8 billion in API revenue for the same period.
Corporate adoption is playing a central role in the rivalry. Microsoft has agreed to integrate Anthropic's Claude into Microsoft 365 and Copilot enterprise products, a move that adds strategic complexity given Microsoft's sizable ownership stake in OpenAI. IBM also announced plans to incorporate Claude into internal systems and client-facing tools. Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer at Anthropic, said, "Claude has become the go-to AI for developers at the world's largest companies because of our focus on safety and reliability."
OpenAI, meanwhile, is preparing for substantial infrastructure expenditures. The company expects to burn roughly $14 billion in cash next year as it scales computing resources and global data-center capacity. In partnership with SoftBank, OpenAI recently launched SB OAI Japan, which will market an enterprise system branded as "Crystal Intelligence" to improve corporate workflow efficiency.
