OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman said the company had a rough first half of the year as rival Anthropic pulled ahead. “Q1 was pretty rough, Q2 was pretty rough,” he said Wednesday. However, new coding tools helped OpenAI recover by the third quarter, making enterprise sales their biggest revenue driver today.
The OpenAI co-founder and president talks about the realization that Anthropic was going to bypass them in revenue this year and how OpenAI is recovering.
OpenAI struggled through a “pretty rough” first half of the year, according to co-founder and President Greg Brockman, a period when rival Anthropic pulled ahead with business customers.
It wasn’t until the third quarter that OpenAI’s new tools for agentic software coding found traction—leading to enterprise overtaking consumer sales as the company’s biggest revenue driver, Brockman said Wednesday at the WSJ Tech conference.
“If you look at what’s really changed this year, Q1 was pretty rough, Q2 was pretty rough—it really looked in many ways, like coding, we weren’t really even in the conversation,” said Brockman. “We had Codex, but no one was talking about it.”
By the third quarter, however, it was “entirely different,” he said, with the release of a new frontier AI model, GPT-5.6 Sol, and ChatGPT Work setting the stage for a comeback. “There had been all this painful behind-the-scenes work that resulted in this incredible revenue inflection,” he said.
Third-party data suggests OpenAI has gained ground on Anthropic in enterprise AI. Among some 120,000 companies that use Anthropic and OpenAI tools, a September analysis from OpenRouter found, the share of spending was roughly even between the two AI giants. At the beginning of the year, Anthropic commanded three-quarters of that total.
Among the enterprises spending more with OpenAI is JPMorgan Chase. Brockman said the company recently struck a strategic partnership to supply the Wall Street company with AI services, including access to OpenAI’s cybersecurity-focused models as part of its Daybreak program. JPMorgan is also a partner in Anthropic’s Project Glasswing, which gives early access to Anthropic’s cybersecurity models.
The Wall Street Journal’s parent company, News Corp, has a content deal with OpenAI.
Brockman’s comments come as Anthropic prepares to go public as soon as this month. Anthropic cited its surging revenue with enterprise customers in the IPO prospectus it filed last month.
OpenAI filed paperwork for its own IPO in June but now plans to go public next year. It has experienced hiccups raising new capital privately.
The company has raised less than half of the $30 billion it had initially targeted for its latest funding round, the Journal previously reported, as market jitters over AI damp investor appetite for one of the industry’s biggest names. The round values OpenAI at $1.25 trillion, below the $1.4 trillion it initially sought, and the company now seeks to raise $20 billion.
Brockman said he thinks OpenAI will be able to go public in 2027. “We want to go public when it’s the right time for us,” said Brockman. “We’ve made so much progress this year, and I honestly never felt more confident in what we’re doing.”
Brockman also addressed his and his wife’s decision to cancel a planned second $25 million donation to Leading the Future, a super PAC working to elect pro-AI candidates to Congress. Brockman acknowledged in a Slack message to OpenAI staff that the group had become a distraction for the company.
“I really believe, and my wife really believes, that safety and AI innovation go hand-in-hand,” said Brockman. “Rightly or wrongly, LTF didn’t end up being perceived that way. It ended up being perceived [as being] against that.”