OpenAI’s annualized revenue run rate has topped $40 billion, roughly double where it stood at the end of 2025, according to a Bloomberg report Thursday citing people familiar with the numbers. The figure lands with unmistakable timing: an IPO reportedly targeting a $1 trillion valuation, which would price the company at roughly 25 times its current run rate.

Internally, the sell is euphoric. President Greg Brockman told staff in an announcement Thursday that July alone grew the run rate more than 20% month-over-month. CFO Sarah Friar had already told employees in late July that the month’s annualized recurring revenue eclipsed all of Q2. Board chair Bret Taylor credited three products, the GPT-5.6 series, ChatGPT Work, and Codex, while conceding OpenAI had been playing catch-up in coding.

That concession is the one worth sitting with. Bloomberg pins the surge on AI coding tools, subscription growth, and a nascent advertising business, but the coding beat is functionally an admission that Anthropic set the pace and OpenAI is now closing it, aggressively, on price. Prices for leading US models have fallen nearly a quarter since mid-July. Inference improvements, OpenAI says, cut the cost of serving GPT-5.6 by 20%. The competitive pressure isn’t only domestic; DeepSeek and Moonshot are grinding the same margins from Shenzhen.

Anthropic disclosed a $47 billion run rate back in May, and Bloomberg politely cautions the two firms may be counting differently. Semafor notes SpaceX and Meta are now elbowing into the frontier-lab tier.

The financial gravity underneath all this is heavier than the growth numbers suggest. OpenAI’s audited filings show a $38.5 billion net loss on $13.07 billion in 2025 revenue, and Reuters previously pegged compute spending at roughly $600 billion through 2030.

The revenue chief job is also churning: incoming CRO Dali Rajic, most recently Wiz’s president and COO, replaces Denise Dresser, OpenAI’s second CRO in under a year. Polymarket puts the odds of an IPO this year at 17%. The run rate is the pitch deck. The loss statement is the fine print.

Sources