OpenAI's revenue run rate hits $70 billion as enterprise sales double

OpenAI is generating money at a pace few technology companies have ever matched. As of late September 2026, the company's annualized revenue run rate has climbed to nearly $70 billion — up more than 70% since the start of the third quarter, according to an Axios scoop citing people familiar with the matter.

The growth is being driven by two engines firing simultaneously. Enterprise (B2B) revenue more than doubled since July, as corporate customers accelerated adoption of OpenAI's API and products including Codex and operator integrations. On the consumer side, OpenAI pulled in more revenue during Q3 alone than it generated from consumers across all of 2025 — a sign that ChatGPT's paid tier is still expanding well beyond its early adopter base.

Context: from $40B to $70B in two months

Bloomberg reported in August that OpenAI was on pace for more than $40 billion in annualized revenue. The near-doubling in just two months reflects both the compounding effect of enterprise contract renewals and the sharp acceleration in GPT-4o and GPT-6 usage that followed the White House AI summit last week.

For comparison, rival Anthropic's annualized run rate reached approximately $65 billion in July, putting it briefly ahead of OpenAI. The new figures suggest OpenAI has reclaimed the revenue lead in the AI model race — though Anthropic's confidential IPO prospectus, filed this month, projects aggressive spending growth that could narrow the gap again.

Why this matters beyond the headline number

Annualized run rates are a projection metric — they extrapolate one month's revenue across twelve — so they can overstate trends that prove temporary. OpenAI's executives have not disclosed profitability figures alongside these numbers, and training and inference costs for frontier models remain enormous. The company still spends heavily on compute, safety research, and personnel.

That said, the velocity of B2B growth is structurally significant. Enterprise deals typically carry multi-year contracts, meaning revenue that converts to ARR this quarter tends to stay on the books. The more than 100% B2B growth rate suggests OpenAI is successfully moving beyond individual developer API usage toward large corporate deployments — the same segment Anthropic has historically dominated.

The disclosure comes as both companies prepare for public offerings. Anthropic's prospectus targets a valuation near $2 trillion; OpenAI has not yet filed but is widely expected to follow. Revenue metrics of this scale will be central to both pitches.

As first reported by Axios on September 29, the figures come from sources familiar with OpenAI's internal financials and have not been independently confirmed by a public filing.