Anthropic found the part of AI companies will actually pay for
OpenAI may have introduced generative AI to the mass market, but Anthropic is increasingly making the stronger case inside the enterprise.
According to a leaked S-1 obtained by Reuters, Anthropic’s revenue grew roughly 12 times in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion. The five-year-old company is now reportedly preparing for an IPO later this fall that could value it at as much as $2 trillion.
That growth has come with enormous spending. The same filing reportedly showed a $42 billion net loss in 2025, illustrating just how capital intensive the race to build frontier AI has become.
Still, Anthropic’s rise is notable because it has taken a very different route from OpenAI.
While ChatGPT became a consumer phenomenon, Anthropic concentrated heavily on coding, enterprise workflows and tools businesses could integrate directly into their operations.
That focus is beginning to look less like a niche strategy and more like one of the most valuable positions in AI.
Claude became the wedge into corporate spending
Anthropic’s biggest breakthrough may not have been a chatbot.
Its Claude coding tools became popular with software developers, giving the company a foothold in one of the earliest areas where businesses have shown a clear willingness to spend heavily on AI.
Anthropic then expanded further into workplace automation with Claude Cowork, pushing its models beyond answering questions and toward completing actual business tasks.
That shift has had consequences across the software sector. Investors have increasingly questioned whether AI agents capable of writing code, analyzing information and completing workflows could reduce demand for some traditional software products.
OpenAI appears to have noticed.
The company reportedly moved earlier this year to cut back on several side projects and place more attention on coding and enterprise products. By August, OpenAI’s enterprise business was generating more revenue than its consumer operations.
The two companies that started with very different strategies are increasingly converging on the same market.
The AI race is shifting from users to economics
Model benchmarks still matter. Anthropic recently introduced Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, only for OpenAI to respond days later with GPT-6 Astra and claims of stronger performance across certain tasks.
But the competition is moving beyond which model wins another benchmark.
The more important questions are becoming:
- Which company can turn AI usage into durable enterprise revenue?
- Which platform becomes embedded deeply enough into corporate workflows that switching becomes difficult?
- How much computing infrastructure is required to generate each dollar of revenue?
- Can either company eventually produce attractive margins after spending tens of billions on models and infrastructure?
Anthropic’s reported growth provides an early answer to the first question.
Businesses appear willing to spend heavily on AI when it can directly improve software development, productivity and workflow automation.
That may prove more durable than simply accumulating consumer users.
A $2 trillion IPO could put the AI rivalry on Wall Street
Anthropic is reportedly targeting a valuation of around $2 trillion in an IPO expected later this fall.
OpenAI, meanwhile, is reportedly considering a roughly $1.5 trillion valuation through a private funding round before a potential public offering in 2027.
Those numbers would place two relatively young AI companies among the most valuable businesses in the world.
They would also give public-market investors something they have never really had during the generative AI boom: the ability to directly value the companies building the frontier models themselves.
Until now, much of the AI trade has flowed through Nvidia, cloud providers, data centers, networking companies and power infrastructure. An Anthropic IPO would bring the economics of the actual AI laboratory into the market.
And investors may discover that the most important competition is no longer who built the first great chatbot. It is who can become the operating layer businesses depend on every day.
Anthropic has built an early lead there.
OpenAI is coming after it.
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