Anthropic vs. OpenAI, the Pre IPO Days
The last few months before lucrative AI IPOs are upon on. Let's do some math. Decoding the crazy high valuations.
Good Morning,
The next AI duopoly of BigAI is almost here. With BigTech benefits. 😄🗺️
Anthropic closed its $30 Bn. round and OpenAI is almost read to close its own $100 Bn. round. Confirmation that OpenAI will keep paying 20% of its revenue to Microsoft until 2032 complicates the business model of OpenAI. Nvidia is in discussions to invest up to $30 billion in OpenAI as part of a funding round that could value the AI startup at a $730 (even as high as $850) billion pre-money valuation. We have to assume that both SpaceX and OpenAI will IPO at near or above $1 Tr. market cap.
I asked Raphaëlle d'Ornano of Decoding Discontinuity (and her team) to do some analysis on the OpenAI vs. Anthropic debate.
Decoding Discontinuity
Frameworks for analyzing the financial and strategic impact of emerging tech like Generative AI.
R.O is a very deep thinker so read her analysis carefully: (related)
Decoding Anthropic’s $380 Billion Valuation: Orchestration over Raw Intelligence in Enterprise AI
The $285 Billion ‘SaaSpocalypse’ Is the Wrong Panic
OpenAI and xAI: When Megawatts Become the New ARPU
Epoch AI (Epoch AI & various writers) are also projecting like Patel and myself have, that Anthropic will overtake OpenAI in ARR not in 2027, but sooner as in this year!
Anthropic Growing Revenue 3x Faster than OpenAI in 2026
When you are growing revenue at a 10x pace instead of a 3.4x pace, that tends to happen. Anthropic is on pace to overtake OpenAI in ARR sometime in late 2026. But what does it mean for Anthropic’s IPO vs. OpenAI’s? In Anthropic’s global push 2026 and 2027 are just massive years for its growth.
Epoch AI notes that The Information shows both companies projecting slower revenue growth in 2026, with OpenAI expecting 2.2× growth, and Anthropic expecting 4× growth or less. No wonder there is a SaaS apocalypse market jitters and narrative. So instead of growing three times as fast, Anthropic may grow twice as fast in 2026. Keep in mind they are also iterating new models faster:
Anthropic releases Sonnet 4.6 this week.
Google releases Gemini 3.1 Pro this week.
In what Industries are Agents being Deployed?
Software Engineering
Back office automation
Other
Marketing, content and copywriting
Sales and CRM
Finance and Accounting
Business Intelligence and Data analysis
Academic Research
As Nvidia reaps the rewards of the GPU-era, we’ll have to track Anthropic more closely now as they dominate Enterprise AI products. OpenAI doesn’t appear to be executing in a customer focused manner like Anthropic has where as each company hit $1B in annualized revenues, Anthropic has grown substantially faster. The trajectory, branding, product and focus feels entirely different. Anthropic of course can’t grow 10x every year as it gets larger, Epoch AI notes that Since July 2025, Anthropic has grown its revenue at a rate of 7×/year rather than 10×. In 2026, most expect 4.5x.
Generational IPOs? 🌊
We are mere months away from the biggest IPOs we’ve ever seen: SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic.
My personal picks for the BigAI winners of the Gen AI era excluding players with vast ecosystems like Google, Meta, xAI:
Nvidia
Anthropic
ByteDance
Broadcom
An Unknown AI Chip maker upstart
Alibaba
SK Hynix (HBM chips)
Core Automation (startup)
An unnamed Chinese AI research lab
An unnamed Chinese AI chip startup
Something Big “Might be Happening”
I don’t know if something big is happening (Shumer) as VC takes over media, they certainly want you to think that this is big.
Decoding Discontinuity have a lot of advanced reports for paying readers. They showed me a recent PDF and I was blown away.
Anthropic are trying to measure agentic autonomy in practice. They might be the moonshot of AI automation that’s hottest right now. Anthropic is likely to be profitable as soon as 2028. Frankly it’s not clear when OpenAI will reach that mark, could be as late as 2031.
OpenAI’s has Raised far more but with less results
OpenAI is Losing Marketshare to Emerging Players
In 2026, Anthropic, Google, xAI and others will increasingly take marketshare away from OpenAI.
Nvidia and Amazon are piling into OpenAI, supposedly to save it as a major customer.
But…if AI was a big thing why are consumers spending more on OnlyFans, than OpenAI and NYT combined?
Anthropic’s Super Bowl Surge in Subscriptions
The cheeky Anthropic Superbowl Ads were a question of good timing and the Claude Code momentum has built incredible momentum going into the pre IPO intensity for both parts of the BigAI (BigTech driven) Duopolies.
This means the faster Anthropic grows, the slower OpenAI will grow. The main early 2026 vibes have been Codex vs. Claude Code.
January, 2026 might have been Anthropic's breakthrough month, wrote Ara Kharazian, an economist at Ramp, which has been tracking business spending on AI.
It’s getting intense: 79% of Anthropic's customers are already OpenAI customers. And churn rates are nearly identical at 4%.
79% of Anthropic's customers are already OpenAI customers. And churn rates are nearly identical at 4%.
According to Ramp’s data as of February 11th, 16% of businesses pay for both OpenAI and Anthropic. A year ago it was 8%.
There will be Winners and Losers
In terms of global competition, if either OpenAI or Anthropic falters there’s Google, Alibaba, ByteDance, xAI, DeepSeek and a host of others pushing including Open-weight Chinese startups you’ve never heard of.
There will also be more nimble new research labs that will end up creating even better AI products, new architectures and offer new approaches to LLMs.
B2B Market Looks Mission Critical
For more sustainable big long-term contracts, Enterprise AI competition looks like the critical piece that will make or break their IPOs. While OpenAI’s B2C marketshare lead once looked impressive, diffusion by Gemini and others will reduce that first-mover advantage.
“1 in 5 businesses on Ramp now pay for Anthropic. A year ago, it was 1 in 25.” - Ara Kharazian, Ramp Economist
It’s highly uncertain if OpenAI’s AI device can compete with the likes of Meta, Apple, Google and others in smart glasses and other AI wearables. A huge market by 2028. It’s not clear if you are an OpenAI bear like I am, what exactly they win in. Especially is the case as ByteDance and Meta become direct competitors. Seedance looks more impressive than Sora, and so forth.
The AI Coding Impact Focus
Sometimes in 2025, Google, Anthropic and Alibaba Qwen began to outpace OpenAI in cadence of new releases and LLM quality making them more attractive for key builders, developers and entrepreneurs. Even Gemini CLI is gaining on Codex now in 2026. While OpenAI has transformed "Codex" from a simple model into a heavy-duty "Agent Command Center," Google’s Gemini CLI has found its niche as the high-context, low-friction alternative. All of this isn’t so great for Cursor or Microsoft’s own Github Copilot.
Anthropic's MCP Advantage begins to Compound
Anthropic and Google are building the agentic protocols that form the scaffolding of the future of Agentic AI. In 2026, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is no longer just an Anthropic experiment; it has become the "USB-C for AI."
Anthropic’s Upcoming Event
Join Anthropic on Tuesday, February 24 for The Briefing: Enterprise Agents, a livestreamed event where we'll demonstrate how Cowork and Plugins help legal, sales, finance, and data teams build new products and solutions.
ChatGPT’s Viral Growth Not Enough
ChatGPT’s growth looked magical, but Gemini and others are now showing similar adoption patterns. The “weekly” users metric don’t stand tall as Generative AI becomes more specialized.
AI Supremacy isn't zero-sum game, new players and global competition will make things interesting. Finally let’s dive into the analysis of the guest contributor.
Feel free to share this if you know anyone interested in the business trajectory of OpenAI or Anthropic, or indeed what “BigAI” will turn into.
OpenAI at a Crossroads: 2026 the pre IPO Last Weeks
See more at Decoding Discontinuity.
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