OpenAI Is Fighting for a Comeback After Anthropic Became the Leading AI Firm

IBL News | New York

OpenAI, the San-Francisco lab that sparked the AI boom but later fell behind rival Anthropic, is fighting for a comeback.

“We did not have our best 12 months ever, which is mostly my fault, but we are about to have our best 12 months to date,” CEO Sam Altman admitted in a post on X earlier this month. “The team is doing amazing work, and I think you’ll be very happy with what they’ve got cooking for you.”

Growth of its flagship consumer product, ChatGPT, has slowed, and sales staff are locked in a costly battle to win over lucrative business customers by offering volume discounts and other sweeteners, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Powered by the success of its coding tool Claude Code, Anthropic’s revenue growth recently surpassed OpenAI’s, as did its valuation—now nearing $1 trillion.

In addition, Anthropic is accelerating plans for an IPO during the fall, emphasizing its lead over OpenAI, which might now wait until next year to go public.

Altman initially staked the business’s growth on ChatGPT, betting that more people would subscribe to the chatbot. Instead, the overnight success of a hit coding tool, Claude Code, made clear that the bigger prize came from selling tools to enterprise and software developers— for “real-world tasks” that reflected how businesses actually used AI, as it framed them.

As it chases its competitor, OpenAI is now scrambling to enter the enterprise market with its Codex programming tool and other professional models.

However, to date, Codex has underperformed expectations, and software engineers prefer Claude Code.

OpenAI also struck a deal with Amazon to sell AI tools to the cloud giant’s customers and hired former Slack CEO Denise Dresser to become its first chief revenue officer.

The company recently released a “super app” that integrates Codex with ChatGPT and a web browser,

This month, it released a new model, called GPT 5.6 Sol, that became an instant hit with developers—and led Anthropic to extend access to its own powerful Fable model to compete.

It is also benefiting from a broader industry backlash against Anthropic, which has been accused of trying to keep cheaper, Chinese models out of the U.S.