Anthropic Outperforms OpenAI in Revenue

0:00Everyone said AI was going to kill the App Store, but it turns out the exact opposite is currently happening. app launches are up 60 % year over year and over 100 % so far in April. So we're going to break down why and spoiler alert, it is because of AI. OpenAI is shutting down Sora next Sunday, April 27th, and the head of Sora, the product chief and the enterprise CTO all walked out the door on the exact same day. Something is happening inside of OpenAI and I want to talk about it. The next thing is that cerebrus the ai chip company just filed for an ipo 23 billion dollar valuation and a 10 billion dollar deal with open ai and a new agreement with aws the ceo is openly saying they took the fastest inference business at open ai away from nvidia this is quite a big claim the next thing is that stanford's new ai index just dropped and the performance gap between the best US and Chinese models has collapsed to a 2.7 % lead in favor of the United States.

1:02Also in this same report, AI agents jumped from 12 % success on real computer tasks to 66 % in one year. So we're going to get into all of that. And personally, I'm seeing a lot there. The other story that I want to talk about is that Anthropic just passed OpenAI in revenue$30 billion in annualized versus 25 billion for open AI, and they did it while training their models with way less compute. This is probably the most insane thing I've seen in a long time once you start looking at these charts. And if you've been trying to figure out how to actually use AI for your work, not just chatting with one model, but actually building little automations to save you time, check out my own startup AI box.ai.

1:42It's a tool I have personally used a ton. You get access to something like over 80 plus AI models inside one account. So if you're already paying for chat GPT or Claude or Gemini separately. Then you stack them all together and get it for$8.99 a month over on AI Box. You can save all of those subscriptions. The part that I love is that we have an automation builder. You literally describe what you want in plain English and our AI builder will link together different AI models, input prompts, and build the tool, the automation for you. You can go check it out at AIbox.ai. There's a link in the description.

2:14So there's been this whole narrative for the last year that AI chatbots and agents were going to kill apps. Why would you want to open a weather app when you can just ask Claude? Or why would you download a fitness tracker when an AI assistant can handle it? So you've heard this take from Carl Perry over at Nothing. You've heard this from Johnny Ive working with OpenAI on whatever AI hardware thing they're building and basically every other tech writer with a sub stack. So it was pretty shocking to me after seeing all of this App figures just put out new numbers and it is the exact opposite. Worldwide app releases in Q1 of 2026 are up 60 % year over year across both Apple's App Store and Google Play.

2:54And on iOS specifically, it's up 80%. In April so far, the month that we're in, total app releases are up 104 % compared to the same window last year. Apple's Greg Joswiak put it really well. He said the rumors of Apple Store's death have been greatly exaggerated. and basically productivity apps are the top five categories. For the first time, utility jumped to number two. This is what I think personally is happening. I think VibeCoding is working. CloudCode, Replit, all of these tools have gotten so good that people with ideas and no engineering background are shipping apps. Right now, I believe it truly is the gold rush and the App Store is basically benefiting in a huge way.

3:33And by the way, if you want to learn how to grow and scale your own business and take courses and learn how I personally am VibeCoding, I actually have a school community called the AI Hustle School Community. There's a link in the description. We talk about everything that we're doing with AI to grow and scale our businesses, how we're vibe coding, how we're putting stuff out there. You go check it out. Okay, the next thing I want to talk about is OpenAI and Sora. There's actually a huge story about OpenAI right now. Basically, they are discontinuing Sora. We've talked about this a ton, but the app officially closes on April 26th.

4:05So six days from me recording this. and the API follows in September. So basically this is their text-to-video product. They launched this with a massive amount of hype last year and it peaked at around a million users. Then it collapsed to under 500 ,000 while they were burning somewhere between a million and$15 million a day in compute, depending on which report you believe. I've seen some eye-watering reports on the costs of this. Either way, it was not sustainable. Then on basically the same day, the shutdown timeline locked in, OpenAI lost three of their major executives. So they lost their product chief, Kevin Whale.

4:39They lost Sora head, Bill Peebles, and their enterprise CTO also was going. So this wasn't fantastic. They had three exits in the same 24 hours. What I think is happening right now is that OpenAI is making a very hard pivot. They're calling, you know, they're basically getting off of these side quests. They're focusing on coding and enterprise, which makes a lot of sense. That's where Anthropic is absolutely eating their lunch right now. We're going to get into this on the deep dive later on. But killing Sora, I think, is a really good signal in this direction. And the reason why is because Anthropic, for the first time, which I'll talk about later, has officially passed OpenAI in annual recurring revenue run rate.

5:16And that is something I did not see coming from a lab that has raised less. And, you know, I mean, basically has way less users. OK, the next thing, though, is that Cerebras has just filed to go public. This is the AI chip company. They're based in Sunnyvale, and they're basically they're pitching themselves as the fastest hardware for training and inference. This is basically an actual competitor to NVIDIA. And I think on the part of the market that NVIDIA currently owns completely, they're competing with them directly. So as a bit of a background, they tried to IPO back in 2024, and they had to pull it because of a federal review over an investment from G42 and Abu Dhabi.

5:55They came back with a$1.1 billion Series G last year, and then they did another billion in a Series H in February at a$23 billion valuation. They did$510 million in revenue in 2025, and they had a net income of about$237 million. So although that number has, I think, some one-time items in it, it's still pretty impressive, and they're shooting for mid-May for their IPO. So the thing that I think was the most impressive in all of this, they've announced a deal with AWS to put these chips inside of Amazon data centers. And they have a deal with OpenAI that's reportedly worth more than$10 billion.

6:34Their CEO, Andrew Feldman, went on record saying, quote, NVIDIA didn't want to lose the fast inference business at OpenAI, and we took that from them. So I think this is a big claim, right? They're saying they're basically stealing business from NVIDIA. Open AI's compute strategy has basically been the single most NVIDIA-dependent story in AI for years. If even a slice of their inference workload is moving to Cerebrass, I think that is the first real crack in NVIDIA's monopoly at the frontier. Definitely worth watching where these IPO prices go. I'm excited about this. Stanford's new AI index is out, and there are two numbers in it that I want to call out specifically.

7:12First, there's a performance gap between the best American and Chinese AI models. It is now 2.7%. Back in May of 2023, depending on what benchmark you looked at, the gap was somewhere between 17 and 32 points. And China is doing this in, you know, for way less money. US private AI investments was about$286 billion last year. In China, it was about 12.4 billion, roughly, you know, 23 times less. And their top model is under three points behind. So that is pretty insane. The second thing I want to cover is that AI agents went from about 12 % success on real computer tasks a year ago to 66 % now.

7:52So this is agents actually navigating software, you know, they're clicking through forms, they're pulling data, they're finishing multi-step jobs in real systems. You know, 66 % is definitely not good enough to let something completely loose, unsupervised on anything that really matters, but it's good enough for giving an agent a really narrow bounded job and checking its work, making sure that it's getting stuff done faster, you can scale it up and having you know, more of these doing things than yourself. If you haven't tried giving an agent a real job in the last couple months, I would definitely try again this week, it feels like we've moved forward a ton.

8:25I've been talking about a lot on the show. I mean, as we're speaking, I have a monitor off to my side that's running Claude Cowork. It is setting up databases, migrating stuff, importing data for projects I'm working on. And it's honestly, these numbers were Stanford saying like 66%. I'm curious the model. I'm curious the timeframe on this. I'm getting like 85 % of tasks completed completely. Some tasks it just struggles with, but like the tasks I know, you know, building websites, gathering data, parsing data, sorting stuff. It is just insanely impressive. So, you know, I think this is basically something that everyone should be trying right now.

9:02Okay. Something that shocked me, absolutely shocked me is that Anthropic has just passed OpenAI in annualized revenue. The run rate is$30 billion at Anthropic. That's about$25 billion over at OpenAI. So the comparison between these two companies, I mean, Anthropic's up$5 billion. And for full context, because I think there's a couple different pieces to this, first is the growth curve. Anthropic was at roughly$9 billion in annualized revenue at the end of 2025. So, you know, just in December. They hit$20 billion in early March and$30 billion in early April. So March to April,$20 to$30 billion.

9:40That's a$10 billion jump. It's taken years to get here. They were at$9 billion in December. So since December till now, we go from$9 billion to$30 billion. Guys, this is mind-boggling. This is insane. This is the absolute greatest run ever. And to be honest, I'm not shocked. I use, I've completely stopped using ChatGPT. I use Anthropic for absolutely everything right now. And the thing that I was recently talking to my wife about with this is, you know, with ChatGPT, sure, you can chat with it. It's great, whatever. But Anthropic is literally doing things for me. Like, as we speak, I have agents on my, you know, side panel that are gathering data, building out websites, doing reports, doing things that there is no API for.

10:28They scrape websites for me and gather information. help me put together these briefs. Like so much is happening. And it's not like, you know, oh, there's like a little custom GPT that I can go to and use over and over again, like I was doing at OpenAI on ChatGPT. I have scheduled tasks every day at 6am. I have a scheduled task, get up, log into all of my podcast distribution platforms, gather all of the data that there's no API for, upload it to a spreadsheet, upload it into like a dashboard that Claude Code built for me. And I get to see data I've never been able to see before. It's incredible.

11:03It saves me. I mean, it's just something I would never do. So I'm saving so much time. It's just amazing, right? Okay. So enough, enough for me on that. Okay. The next thing I want to talk about is the customer mix specifically about 80 % of Anthropics revenue comes from business customers. OpenAI is much more consumer heavy. They still have 900 million plus weekly active users on ChatGPT. This is, you know, this is a massive moat by just the fact that so many people are using chat GPT. But I think the enterprise side is where the actual dollars are. And that's the side that Anthropic absolutely owns right now.

11:34Back in February, they had over 500 customers, each spending more than a million dollars a year on Claude. By April, that number is over 1000. It doubled in about two months. The other thing that I think is really underrated is that Anthropic is doing this while spending roughly four times less on training than OpenAI. That is insane. They're making more money with smaller training runs. And if that holds, basically the unit economics on the Anthropik side look way better than for anyone else on the frontier. And I think basically that's what investors are going to keep pulling on, right? And then in addition to all of that, you can look at all of the compute deals that Anthropik has going on right now, right?

12:11They have Google, Broadcom, about 3.5 gigawatts of next-gen TPU capacity. And that starts in 2027. And on top of the roughly one gigawatt of Google Compute, they already have lined up for 2026. They have 3.5 gigawatts. This is, you know, one of the largest publicly announced AI infrastructure commitments ever for scale. That's roughly the output of three plus nuclear reactors dedicated to running CLOD. So what does this actually mean? This is what I think is the most interesting with all of this. A year ago, you know, the working assumption in AI was that OpenAI had basically this insurmountable lead.

12:44They had the brand, they had the consumer scale. I mean, even today, 900 million weekly actual users is mind boggling. You know, they had the Microsoft partnership as well and a lot of distribution. And that assumption now is broken. I mean, just look at Microsoft. Anthropic has gotten in there with all of the Microsoft products and has clawed running inside of all of them. And I hear people using that all the time. It also turns out, I think having the best coding model and being the kind of enterprise default is way more valuable than being the consumer default, at least while enterprise are the ones actually paying, you know, full freight for AI.

13:18Personally, I'm paying$200 a month for Cloud Code, and I never really paid that for OpenAI because I didn't get the value out of it. Right now I'm getting like, you know, I would say I'm getting$30 ,000 a month of value out of Cloud Code if I had to pay someone to do all, you know, the projects that I'm working on. So it's just the ROI is so insane to me. And I think we also have, you know, probably a moment for OpenAI where they're shifting, they're shutting down a bunch of side projects, side quests like even Sora so they can focus on this. So I do think we're going to see a pretty strong, I don't think OpenAI is going down without a fight.

13:50I think we're going to see some really strong competition in the near future, but it seems like Anthropic is really pulling ahead in a few certain areas. One of those is just pulling in pure money. That's the show for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you could do me one massive favor that would help the show out so much, if you could leave a review on Spotify or Apple, it basically helps the show get found out by more incredible people like yourself. Also, a quick reminder, go check out AIbox.ai if you haven't yet. There's over 80 models building your own automations. It's$8.99 a month.

14:23The link is in the description. All right, I'll catch you guys all in the next episode.