OpenAI's leaders called a company-wide meeting this week with a clear message: the business is growing fast, and don't let the headlines about competition spook you.
At a Wednesday all-hands gathering, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar and board chairman Bret Taylor spoke to employees about financial matters and future plans. With a potential enormous IPO on the horizon, the company must defend its $852 billion price tag amid a growing roster of competitors.
"You're seeing people who went deep on Claude Code, ended up with a very high bill, and started looking for an alternative," Taylor said during the meeting, according to a partial transcript reviewed by CNBC.
But when the competitor is Anthropic - which announced in May that its annualized revenue had reached $47 billion, a sharp increase from about $10 billion in all of 2025 - it is worth paying attention to.
The revenue picture inside OpenAI is pretty striking. In March, The Information noted that OpenAI's annualized revenue had surpassed $25 billion. In July, OpenAI's recurring revenue on an annualized basis had already outdone the total for Q2. "And Q2 was no slouch," Friar said.
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To put that growth into perspective, That is a lot of trust baked into one private company's stock price. The bet is that AI adoption keeps accelerating and that OpenAI stays the name people reach for first.
The company also has big spending plans.
Anthropic is not the only rival OpenAI has to keep an eye on. Moonshot AI from China introduced Kimi K3, asserting that it narrows the difference with top American models and even beats OpenAI and Anthropic's best on certain benchmarks. These open-weight Chinese models are available for a fraction of the price.
The rapid revenue growth comes amidst a fiercely competitive landscape. Anthropic's revenue run rate topping $47 billion and the emergence of cheaper Chinese models force OpenAI to justify its premium pricing. Meanwhile, the planned roughly $600 billion compute investment - including the Nvidia negotiations for an Ohio data center - signals that OpenAI is betting heavily on scale to maintain its edge.
For investors, the key question will be whether this capital expenditure can translate into sustainable returns.
If OpenAI does go public, the IPO would be one of the largest in history. An $852 billion valuation out of the gate would put it in the same conversation as some of the biggest companies on earth.
For someone watching from the outside, the real question is whether the revenue growth justifies the price tag. The company is clearly growing its annualized recurring revenue faster than it was a quarter ago. But it is also spending at a staggering scale - targeting roughly $600 billion on compute infrastructure is not a small gamble.
The bottom line: OpenAI is growing fast, but spending just as aggressively. When it eventually hits the public market - if it does - investors will get a clearer look at whether that trade-off makes sense. Until then, the internal numbers suggest the company is confident enough to keep pushing hard, even with competitors closing in.
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