OpenAI surpassed $25 billion in annualized revenue by the end of February 2026, growing 17% in just two months. The company is now worth more than Ford, GM, and Boeing combined, with discussions around a $1 trillion IPO valuation. Law firms Cooley and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz have been selected for the listing, according to The Information.
The Revenue Race
Anthropic is approaching $19 billion in annualized revenue, compressing the gap to just $6 billion. The growth rates tell the real story: Anthropic is expanding roughly 10x year-over-year versus OpenAI’s 3.4x. Claude Code alone generates $2.5 billion annually. Anthropic counts eight of the Fortune 10 as active customers, with over 500 enterprise clients spending $1 million or more per year.
ChatGPT holds 80.49% of AI chatbot market share by First Page Sage’s measure, but Similarweb’s web traffic data shows that share dropping from 87.2% to 68% over the past year. Mobile app market share fell from 69.1% to 45.3% (Apptopia). The QuitGPT movement accelerated the erosion, but the trend predates the Pentagon controversy.
What Going Public Changes
OpenAI’s trajectory from nonprofit to the largest tech IPO in history raises questions about whether public market pressures will further accelerate the company’s commercial pivots. Advertising already launched. The Pentagon deal was signed. The safety team was restructured. Each decision that prioritizes revenue over the company’s original mission becomes harder to reverse once public shareholders demand quarterly growth.
Anthropic is reportedly pursuing parallel IPO discussions for Q4 2026, with projections of raising $60 billion or more. The AI industry may see both of its leading companies go public within months of each other — giving investors the most direct comparison of competing AI business models since Google and Yahoo in the early 2000s.
