OpenAI reportedly tops $10 billion in a quarter, but a -109% margin is the fine print

Bloomberg, citing anonymous sources, reports that OpenAI’s quarterly revenue passed $10 billion for the first time. TechCrunch notes that would be an almost 50% jump from the roughly $6.7 billion reported for the second quarter, a sharp acceleration from the roughly 18% quarter-over-quarter growth reported earlier in the year. The report says OpenAI’s adjusted operating margin improved from -150% to -109% and that it is at a $50 billion annual run rate, consistent with October reporting that its run rate was closer to $50 billion than $70 billion (coverage).

This is anonymously sourced and OpenAI hasn’t confirmed it. The direction is credible; the exact figures are provisional.

A nearly 50% sequential jump at this scale doesn’t happen by accident. TechCrunch points to tighter pricing, discounts, better models and a heavier tilt toward enterprise products and agents. Greg Brockman has said enterprise revenue flipped from roughly 30% of the mix to the majority and that OpenAI could be IPO-ready in 2027 (coverage). Customers paying for tools that finish actual work is the healthiest kind of AI revenue, and the clearest evidence yet that OpenAI isn’t leaning only on a huge consumer audience that mostly sits on free or cheap plans; it says it has more than a billion users.

A -109% adjusted operating margin means OpenAI still spends far more than it brings in to deliver that revenue. Better than -150%, but growth bought with discounts can look great for a quarter and stall when discounts end. Whether margin keeps narrowing as revenue grows separates a business from a subsidy. Its financial ties remain tangled: Microsoft recorded $10 billion in revenue from OpenAI in one quarter (coverage), and suppliers like TSMC are now buying stakes (coverage).

The report landed a day after Anthropic said its run rate reached $81 billion as it heads toward an IPO seeking a $1.4 trillion valuation; Anthropic recently reported $17 billion in third-quarter revenue and pulled ahead in enterprise growth this year. TechCrunch flags that the two count annualized revenue differently: Anthropic includes sales through cloud partners, while OpenAI reports only its share of some partner sales. The gap between $50 billion and $81 billion is real in direction but probably overstated in size.

Two frontier labs pulling in this kind of money will set prices, terms and defaults for much of the software industry. That’s useful when it funds better models and a concern when enterprise buyers get locked into one vendor’s agents just as open-source and Chinese models get cheap and capable. Both also compete with Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Google. More in our OpenAI coverage and business coverage.