OpenAI just reported its first-quarter 2026 earnings, and the headline figure is $5.7 billion in revenue — about $1 billion ahead of rival Anthropic. But if you zoom out to annualized numbers, Anthropic is lapping OpenAI: $45 billion versus $30 billion.
The growth was driven by OpenAI's Codex coding agent, enterprise sales, and early ad tests in ChatGPT. Despite tracking toward its $30 billion full-year target, the company's adjusted operating margin hit -122% — meaning it loses $1.22 for every dollar of revenue, excluding stock-based compensation and other big items.
Thanks to that Q1 performance, OpenAI secured $122 billion in fresh financing from suppliers like Amazon and Nvidia. Anthropic, meanwhile, is seeking $30 billion. Both companies are eyeing potential IPOs as early as the fourth quarter of 2026.
On the user front, ChatGPT averaged 905 million weekly active users in Q1 — down from a February peak of 920 million and short of OpenAI's 1 billion goal. The company has warned employees about competitive pressure from Google integrating Gemini into search. But since releasing GPT-5.5 and a new image generation model in April, user growth has accelerated again.
Paid personal subscribers hit 55 million in Q1, up from 47 million at the end of 2025. Looking further ahead, OpenAI plans to generate $102 billion in annual revenue from ChatGPT advertising by 2030.