Thursday, August 20, 2026HotTea verified storyVerified 12:07 AM PDT
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WSJ reported Anthropic passed OpenAI in quarterly revenue while OpenAI’s losses widened.

The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI’s second-quarter revenue rose 18 percent to $6.7 billion while operating losses widened to $12.3 billion, and that Anthropic’s revenue more than doubled to $11.6 billion with a small operating profit. Axios separately reported Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate had topped $65 billion, citing Bloomberg reporting and tying the growth to enterprise demand.

Verified 12:07 AM PDT · 2 original sources

The evidence

What the reporting establishes

What happened

The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI’s second-quarter revenue rose 18 percent to $6.7 billion while operating losses widened to $12.3 billion, and that Anthropic’s revenue more than doubled to $11.6 billion with a small operating profit. Axios separately reported Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate had topped $65 billion, citing Bloomberg reporting and tying the growth to enterprise demand.

Pressure point

These are reported private-company financial figures, not audited public-company filings. The signal is still material because it shifts the business question from consumer reach to whether enterprise coding and agent workflows can carry frontier-model economics.

What to watch

Whether IPO filings or audited disclosures confirm the revenue and loss figures, whether Claude Code-style workflow revenue persists after pricing pressure, whether OpenAI’s broader consumer strategy converts to margin, and whether compute costs keep falling fast enough to change the comparison.

Audit the story

Original sources

Company claims remain company claims. Follow the reporting and judge the evidence directly.

  1. Wall Street JournalOpenAI's Second-Quarter Sales Show Tepid Growth Compared With Anthropic
  2. AxiosAnthropic's revenue run rate reportedly surpasses $65 billion pre-IPO

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