OpenAI’s growth rate has overtaken Anthropic’s for the first time this quarter, according to two separate datasets, even as Anthropic still holds the larger revenue base. The two labs are no longer settling into a stable pecking order. Read the growth figures and the absolute figures separately, because collapsed together they tell a false story.
Quarterly revenue climbed 35 percent since OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6 Sol on July 9, with enterprise revenue up more than 50 percent, CNBC reported. That is the fastest stretch OpenAI has posted in months, and it lines up with the model’s launch date closely enough to credit Sol directly.
A second dataset points the same direction. The Ramp AI Index tracked business API spending by quarter and found OpenAI growing 82 percent quarter over quarter in Q3, ahead of Anthropic’s 76 percent. Ramp draws on real card and invoice spending by its business customers, a different lens than CNBC’s revenue reporting, and the two independent sources agreeing on direction is worth more than either alone. Both figures describe growth rate, not the size of the underlying business, and OpenAI’s rate advantage does not by itself close the revenue gap with Anthropic.
AI Insiders reported this week that Anthropic had reached a $65 billion annualized run rate and was preparing supervoting share structures ahead of a possible IPO. This quarter’s numbers read as OpenAI’s answer to that momentum, not a reversal of it.
Before Sol launched, Anthropic had posted $11.6 billion in quarterly revenue against OpenAI’s $6.7 billion, outpacing OpenAI in a single quarter for the first time, Bloomberg reported. The Wall Street Journal put the same $65 billion annualized figure on Anthropic’s business at that point. Growth had cooled at both labs before Sol, partly because open-weight models kept taking share from paid API traffic.
The next data point arrives soon. Astra, OpenAI’s next model, is due within weeks, and rumors point to an improved Fable 5.1 as Anthropic’s response, though nothing about that release has been confirmed. Neither company has said which one, if either, will hold its growth rate once the other ships. Both labs have already shown that a single release can swing a quarter’s growth rate by double digits, which means the next thirty days of API spending data will matter more than either company’s messaging around Astra or Fable 5.1.
For operators sizing vendor contracts, the takeaway is not that OpenAI has retaken the lead. It has not, by revenue. It is that Anthropic’s advantage narrowed by double digits in a single quarter, and the next model release from either lab could move it again before year end.
Matthias Bastian reported this for The Decoder on August 21, 2026, citing Ramp and CNBC for the current figures and Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal for the earlier quarterly comparison.
