OpenAI revenue run rate nears $70 billion as business sales double
On 29 September 2026, Axios reported that OpenAI's annualised revenue run rate is close to $70 billion, up more than 70% since the start of the third quarter, with business-to-business sales more than doubling since July. Reuters and Bloomberg carried the figures the same day; OpenAI did not comment. For a business that buys AI services the headline is not the number itself but what sits behind it: two suppliers of roughly equal size, both cutting prices to win volume.
In short
- Axios reported on 29 September 2026 that OpenAI's annualised revenue run rate is nearly $70 billion, up more than 70% since July.
- Business-to-business revenue more than doubled in the same period; consumer revenue added in Q3 exceeded all of 2025.
- Anthropic's run rate was about $65 billion in July, so the two suppliers are now close in size.
- Run rate is a projection; OpenAI's expenses are unknown, and its 2025 audited accounts showed a $38.5 billion loss on $13.07 billion revenue.
- For buyers of AI automation, the trend is lower prices and a stable two-supplier market.
What happened
Axios reported on Tuesday, 29 September 2026, citing people familiar with OpenAI's financials, that the company's annualised revenue run rate is nearly $70 billion. Three figures stand out in that report. The run rate has grown more than 70% since the third quarter began in July. Business-to-business revenue has more than doubled over the same period. And on the consumer side, OpenAI added more revenue in the third quarter alone than it added in the whole of 2025.
Reuters and Bloomberg both carried the story the same day. Bloomberg noted that in August the company had been on pace for a little over $40 billion, so the figure has risen by roughly $30 billion in about two months. OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment from either agency.
A run rate is a projection, not a result: it takes the most recent period's sales and multiplies them out to a full year. Reuters, in its coverage, pointed out that the measure can distort where a company's finances are actually heading. Axios also said it could not learn OpenAI's expenses. For context, OpenAI's audited accounts for 2025 showed revenue of $13.07 billion and a net loss of $38.5 billion, according to Yahoo Finance's report on the same story.
How it compares with Anthropic
The report reverses a position from earlier in the year. In the second quarter, Anthropic posted $11.6 billion in quarterly revenue against OpenAI's $6.7 billion, the first quarter in which OpenAI trailed. By July, Anthropic's annualised run rate was about $65 billion, according to Axios. Anthropic's IPO prospectus, seen by Reuters on 28 September, put its 2025 revenue at nearly $4.6 billion, twelve times the year before, alongside $518 billion in future cloud and infrastructure commitments.
So the two companies now sit within a few billion dollars of each other on run rate, and both are heading towards public listings that will force them to publish audited costs.
Why it matters for a business that automates work
Most companies that automate clerical work do it on top of one of these two suppliers, directly or through a tool that uses their models. Three practical consequences follow from the numbers.
First, prices keep falling. OpenAI released GPT-6 Luna on 22 September at $0.10 per million input tokens; Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5 on 28 September at the same list price as its predecessor but using about 30% fewer tokens for the same work. Revenue is growing on volume, not on higher prices, and both companies are competing for the same enterprise contracts. A business that set its automation budget a year ago is almost certainly overestimating today's running cost.
Second, the enterprise side is where the growth is. A doubling of business revenue in one quarter means the products aimed at companies, such as the APIs, batch processing, agents and enterprise plans, are getting the investment. The tools a small or large business uses to automate invoices, follow-ups and document handling will improve faster than the consumer chatbot does.
Third, a two-supplier market is safer to build on than a one-supplier market. Two years ago, building a workflow on a single model was a real dependency risk. With two suppliers of comparable scale and near-identical capabilities, a workflow can be built to switch between them, and a price rise or outage at one is not an emergency.
What to watch
The IPO filings. Run rates are chosen by the companies; audited accounts are not. When both prospectuses are public, the real cost of delivering these services will be visible, and that is what will determine whether today's prices hold. Until then, treat the $70 billion as a signal of demand, not a statement of profit.
Sources
- Axios — Scoop: OpenAI's annual recurring revenue nears $70B (29 Sep 2026)
- Bloomberg — OpenAI Revenue Run Rate Approaches $70 Billion, Axios Reports (29 Sep 2026)
- Reuters via The Star — OpenAI's annual recurring revenue nears $70 billion (29 Sep 2026)
- Yahoo Finance — OpenAI Q3 2026 revenue run rate nears $70 billion (29 Sep 2026)
How AiStaffo would automate this
Falling model prices are the reason automation that was uneconomic in 2024 is routine now. AiStaffo builds on whichever supplier is best value for each task and keeps the workflow switchable, so a client's monthly cost follows the market down rather than being locked to one vendor's price list.
Questions people ask
What does 'annualised revenue run rate' mean?
Is OpenAI profitable?
Does this change what a business should pay for AI automation?
Which supplier should a business build on, OpenAI or Anthropic?
Where do these figures come from?
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