Sarah Friar, CFO of OpenAI, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2026.
Oscar Molina | CNBC
As OpenAI chases rival Anthropic in the enterprise and tries to sustain growth in the face of new competition from cheaper open-source alternatives, the artificial intelligence company is seeking to reassure staffers that the business remains healthy.
In an internal meeting with employees on Wednesday, finance chief Sarah Friar and board chair Bret Taylor touted OpenAI’s revenue growth and addressed competition with Anthropic, CNBC has learned. Friar said OpenAI’s annualized recurring revenue in July exceeded the entire second quarter.
“And Q2 was no slouch,” Friar said, according to a partial transcript of the meeting that was reviewed by CNBC.
Friar and Taylor said momentum was driven by the release of the company’s GPT-5.6 series of models, its new enterprise agent called ChatGPT Work, and growing adoption of its AI coding tool, Codex.
OpenAI is under pressure to justify its $852 billion valuation as it gears up for a potentially massive IPO. The company faces a constantly changing competitive landscape that includes Anthropic and Google as well as a slew of so-called open-weight models out of China that can be accessed at much lower costs. Earlier this month, China’s Moonshot AI unveiled Kimi K3, which claims it closes the gap with leading U.S. offerings and surpasses OpenAI and Anthropic’s most capable systems on some benchmarks.
OpenAI has been racing to bring in new users, particularly enterprises and developers, in order to generate the revenue needed to help support its infrastructure spending plans, which are being funded by outside capital.
In February, OpenAI told investors that it plans to target roughly $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030. It’s currently in discussions with Nvidia about a backstop of up to $250 billion that would help fund its plans to lease a massive new AI data center in Ohio, as CNBC reported earlier this week.
The staggering figures and the rapid rise of Anthropic, which surpassed OpenAI by valuation earlier this year, have raised questions about the durability of OpenAI’s business. Anthropic said in May that its revenue run rate revenue topped $47 billion, up from the roughly $10 billion that it generated for all of 2025, as its Claude Code tool has become a huge hit with developers.
The Information reported in March that OpenAI had recently topped $25 billion in annualized revenue, citing a person with knowledge of the matter.
Taylor told employees on Wednesday that Anthropic had a strong start to the year, and he acknowledged that OpenAI had to play catch-up in the coding market. But he said he’s encouraged by Codex’s growth.
“You’re seeing people who went deep on Claude Code, ended up with a very high bill, and started looking for an alternative,” Taylor said at the meeting.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic confidentially filed for IPOs with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June. Neither company has disclosed additional details about when they plan to debut.
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