OpenAI revenue in July tops all of Q2, CFO Sarah Friar tells staff

OpenAI said its annualized recurring revenue in July topped the total revenue for the entire second quarter, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told employees at an internal meeting on July 29, 2026. “And Q2 was no slouch,” Friar said, according to a partial transcript reviewed by CNBC. Board Chair Bret Taylor also addressed competition with Anthropic at the gathering. The executives attributed the momentum to the release of the GPT-5.6 series of models, the new enterprise agent ChatGPT Work, and growing adoption of the AI coding tool Codex. OpenAI is under pressure to justify its $852 billion valuation as it prepares for a potentially massive IPO. The company faces a competitive landscape that includes Anthropic, Google, and lower-cost open-weight models from China. In July 2026, Moonshot AI unveiled Kimi K3, which it claims surpasses the most capable systems from OpenAI and Anthropic on some benchmarks. OpenAI has been racing to attract enterprise users and developers to generate revenue for its infrastructure spending plans, which are funded by outside capital. In February 2026, the company told investors it aims for roughly $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030 and is in discussions with Nvidia about a backstop of up to $250 billion to help fund a massive new AI data center in Ohio, CNBC reported. Anthropic’s rapid rise has raised questions about OpenAI’s business durability. Anthropic’s revenue run rate topped $47 billion in May 2026, up from roughly $10 billion for all of 2025, driven by its Claude Code tool. Taylor acknowledged that Anthropic had a strong start to the year and that OpenAI had to catch up in coding, but he expressed encouragement about Codex’s growth, noting that some users who went deep on Claude Code and faced high bills are seeking alternatives. Both OpenAI and Anthropic confidentially filed for IPOs with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June 2026, though neither has disclosed additional details about their debut plans.