ChatGPT Towers Over Claude With 900 Million Users — But Anthropic May Be Winning The AI Revenue Race, IDC Estimates

While OpenAI’s ChatGPT appears to maintain a commanding lead in global AI chatbot usage, new industry estimates suggest Anthropic may be generating more revenue despite serving a fraction of the users.

ChatGPT Retains Clear Lead In Global AI Usage According to estimates shared with by IDC Research Vice President Arnal Dayaratna, ChatGPT remains the dominant consumer-facing large language model chatbot, with more than 900 million weekly active users worldwide.

IDC estimates Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG ) (NASDAQ: GOOGL ) Google Gemini has between 200 million and 250 million weekly active users, while Anthropic’s Claude is believed to have between 40 million and 60 million weekly active users.

Dayaratna said OpenAI’s business appears to be diversified across consumer subscriptions, workplace seats, APIs and platform usage.

IDC estimates OpenAI is generating between $30 billion and $40 billion in annualized revenue, including roughly $10 billion to $13 billion from consumer subscriptions and as much as $20 billion from API and platform-related usage.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to ’s request for comments.

However, earlier this month, reports indicated that OpenAI generated $5.7 billion in revenue during the first quarter of 2026 while spending approximately $3.7 billion.

Reports also said the company’s net loss expanded to roughly $39 billion in 2025, compared with about $5 billion the previous year.

Read Also: Why OpenAI's Jalapeño Is Really A Broadcom Story Anthropic’s Enterprise Strategy Drives Revenue Growth Despite trailing significantly in consumer adoption, Anthropic may be outperforming rivals in monetization.

IDC estimates Anthropic’s annualized revenue is between $40 billion and $50 billion, with consumer subscriptions accounting for less than $2 billion.

The firm’s revenue appears to be concentrated in enterprise subscriptions, Claude Code seats, API consumption and other high-volume workloads. “Usage scale tells a different story from revenue mix,” Dayaratna noted, adding that Claude’s business appears far more weighted toward enterprise and developer use cases than consumer adoption.

In an emailed statement to, Anthropic pointed to a May 2026 blog post announcing that its annualized run-rate revenue had surpassed $47 billion.

Counterpoint Research Paints Similar Monetization Picture Separate estimates from Counterpoint Research point to a similar trend.

The research firm in April 2026 report estimated Anthropic captured 31.4% of global LLM revenue during the first quarter of 2026, ahead of OpenAI’s 29% share.

Counterpoint also estimated Anthropic generated the highest average monthly revenue per user in the industry at $33.3, far above OpenAI’s $2.2.

At the same time, Counterpoint also estimated OpenAI had roughly 900 million monthly active users, compared with approximately 65 million for Anthropic.

Anthropic’s Rise Challenges OpenAI Both OpenAI and Anthropic have confidentially begun laying the groundwork for potential future public offerings.

In May, Anthropic surpassed OpenAI to become the world’s most valuable startup after securing a $65 billion Series H funding round that valued the company at $965 billion.

Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published editors.

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