Anthropic and OpenAI Both Filed to Go Public. The Numbers Tell Two Different Stories.

The revenue picture

Anthropic's run-rate revenue hit roughly $47 billion in May, up from about $10 billion a year earlier, and the company expects to cross $50 billion annualized by the end of June. More striking: it says it is approaching its first profitable quarter. For a frontier lab, that sentence has never been written before.

OpenAI's disclosed figures run on a different clock. Annual recurring revenue passed $20 billion in 2025, roughly tripling since 2023. The company projects a $14 billion loss for 2026 and doesn't expect profitability until 2029.

Read those paragraphs again, because the usual narrative has them backwards. OpenAI has the bigger consumer brand, the billion monthly users, the household name. Anthropic, the enterprise-heavy lab that most consumers couldn't pick out of a lineup two years ago, is the one with more than twice the revenue run-rate and a sightline to profits.

The valuations

Anthropic's Series H, confirmed May 28, raised $65 billion at a $965 billion post-money valuation, co-led by Sequoia, Dragoneer, Altimeter, and Greenoaks, with Microsoft and NVIDIA among the participants. Microsoft showing up on Anthropic's cap table would have been unthinkable in 2023. It is now just diversification.

OpenAI's March round of $122 billion set its private valuation at $852 billion, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the eventual listing, possibly as soon as the September-to-November window.

So the private markets currently say Anthropic is worth about 13 percent more than OpenAI. The public markets are about to referee that disagreement with real money.

The capex footnote that isn't a footnote

Buried in the Anthropic coverage is a $36 billion private credit arrangement with Apollo Global Management and Blackstone to finance custom Google TPU capacity, alongside data center projects in New York, Texas, Louisiana, and Indiana. Both labs are walking into the public markets carrying infrastructure commitments that would have qualified as national projects a decade ago. Public investors will need to get comfortable valuing model labs the way they value utilities, because the balance sheets increasingly look like one.

One more piece of housekeeping cleared the runway: a judge dismissed Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI on June 8 on statute of limitations grounds, removing the messiest item from its risk factors section. Convenient timing, given Musk's own SpaceX-xAI combination priced its IPO three days later.

The argument goes public

For three years, "how much is a frontier lab actually worth" has been a private argument between venture firms. Two S-1s and one giant rocket IPO later, it's about to become a public market price, updated every trading day.

My advice is the same as it was for SpaceX: ignore the opening pop. Watch Anthropic's gross margins and OpenAI's loss curve. One of these companies has to prove it can stay profitable at scale, the other that it can ever get there. Those are different bets, and for the first time, you'll be able to price them separately.