ChatGPT tops 1.2 billion weekly users as OpenAI's revenue rate nears $70B

OpenAI used DevDay to publish updated usage figures. More than 1.2 billion people now use ChatGPT every week, while over 35 million use ChatGPT Work and Codex weekly, and 2.5 million businesses run on the company's products. Alongside those numbers, Axios reported a revenue figure that became the main subject of the announcement.

Revenue is approaching $70 billion a year

Axios reported that OpenAI's annual recurring revenue is nearing $70 billion, about 70 percent higher than at the start of the third quarter. ARR projects current monthly revenue across a full year, so it measures a pace rather than verified annual income. The growth is driven by enterprise sales and an aggressive price war against Claude and Chinese models, a strategy OpenAI reinforced with the just-launched GPT-6.1-Sol.

The Codex coding assistant is also growing quickly, carried by the popularity of the GPT-6 model family.

Anthropic is close behind

Anthropic's annualized revenue rate reportedly passed $65 billion in July and may now match or exceed OpenAI's. Anthropic is preparing an IPO as early as November, and its filing reflects soaring revenue alongside mounting costs and risks. Anthropic also signed an $11.6 billion cloud deal with Akamai, which reporting says pushed its compute spending past $500 billion in under a year.

The unresolved question

For both companies the open question is whether revenue can grow fast enough to cover the data center bills behind those numbers. Usage at this scale requires enormous compute, and the commitments now being signed run far ahead of current income. OpenAI has not published the accounting behind the $70 billion figure: the number comes from Axios, not from the company on stage at DevDay.