OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar told employees Wednesday that the company's annualized recurring revenue in July had already exceeded the total for the second quarter, according to CNBC.
Finance chief Sarah Friar cited the GPT-5.6 model series, ChatGPT Work, and AI coding tool Codex as drivers of growth
Cheng Xin / Getty Images
OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar told employees Wednesday that the company's annualized recurring revenue in July had already exceeded the total for the second quarter, according to CNBC.
"And Q2 was no slouch," Friar said, according to a partial transcript of the internal meeting reviewed by CNBC.
Friar made the remarks alongside board chair Bret Taylor at an all-hands gathering. The two attributed the momentum to three products: the GPT-5.6 series of models, an enterprise agent called ChatGPT Work, and Codex, the company's AI coding tool.
Taylor addressed competition from Anthropic, acknowledging that OpenAI had been playing catch-up in the coding market. He said he was encouraged by Codex's early traction.
"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.
Anthropic disclosed in May that its annualized revenue had reached $47 billion, a sharp jump from the approximately $10 billion it brought in during all of 2025, with Claude Code playing a central role in that expansion. Anthropic also surpassed OpenAI by valuation earlier this year.
The internal meeting came as OpenAI faces pressure on multiple fronts. China's Moonshot AI this month introduced a model called Kimi K3 that the company says narrows the distance between Chinese and top American AI systems and outperforms OpenAI and Anthropic's flagship models on certain benchmarks. A range of cheaper open-weight models from Chinese developers has added to the competitive pressure.
OpenAI is also racing to secure the revenue needed to support its infrastructure ambitions. The company is in discussions with Nvidia $NVDA about a backstop of up to $250 billion to help fund a large new AI data center in Ohio.
OpenAI's finances and IPO plans have drawn close scrutiny. The company posted a net loss of $38.5 billion in 2025 on $13.07 billion in revenue, according to audited financial documents obtained and verified independently. The company is currently valued at $852 billion. OpenAI and Anthropic each submitted confidential IPO filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, and neither has said when it expects to list publicly. OpenAI has been leaning toward a 2027 listing at a $1 trillion valuation, according to The New York Times.
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