A number that moved faster than the quarter
OpenAI’s annual recurring revenue is approaching $70 billion, Axios reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the company’s financials. The same reporting says enterprise sales have more than doubled since July.
That is a run rate, not a year’s takings — it annualises current monthly revenue — but the direction is the story. Bloomberg had put OpenAI on course for more than $40 billion in annualised revenue as recently as August. Axios reports growth of more than 70 per cent since the start of the third quarter, and says OpenAI added more consumer revenue during the quarter than it added in the whole of 2025.
OpenAI has not published the figure itself, and none of the reporting includes a full expense picture. What the company spends to earn it is not in the number.
The enterprise gap is the point
The reason enterprise growth leads the coverage is competitive. Anthropic has spent two years as the default choice for businesses buying frontier models, and its own IPO prospectus — filed ahead of a planned listing — is the first time the market has seen that business audited rather than briefed.
A doubling of OpenAI’s business-to-business sales in a single quarter, if it holds, is the first serious dent in that position. It also lands in the same week OpenAI put an enterprise agent product, dots, into Pro and Business Premium plans, and opened an OpenAI Marketplace letting enterprise customers spend part of their existing commitment on 32 partner vendors.
What the figure does not settle
Run rates are the most flattering way to describe a fast-growing business, and the most fragile. A run rate counts the best month twice over; it does not survive a flat one.
Nor does it speak to margin. OpenAI’s costs are dominated by compute it buys rather than owns, and the industry’s contracted obligations are now enormous: Anthropic’s prospectus discloses $518 billion in outstanding cloud infrastructure commitments against $4.6 billion of revenue. Nothing in the Axios report tells you where OpenAI sits on that axis.
It is also worth noting how the number arrived. It was not an earnings release or a filing. It was a briefing to a reporter, in a week when OpenAI was announcing more than 20 products and Anthropic was preparing to list.
What to watch
The test is the fourth quarter. If enterprise revenue doubled on the back of agent products that are only now generally available, the December figures will show whether that was a launch spike or a new floor. The other thing to watch is whether OpenAI starts publishing any of this itself. So far, the only audited numbers in frontier AI belong to the company going public.
