Combined lab revenue growth tells engineers whether compute funding for future models is likely to keep scaling.
Key takeaways · AI-distilled
OpenAI's revenue run rate tripled in a year to over $40B, while Anthropic went from $1B to $9B in 2025, more than tripled in Q1 2026 and reportedly hit $65B by end of July; the post cautions the labs book cloud resales differently, inflating Anthropic's figure.
Combining the two to factor out Anthropic overtaking OpenAI, revenue tripled in 2024, grew more than fourfold in 2025, and rose 3.5x in 2026 to August, from $30B to $105B, faster growth from a higher base.
The authors offer a temporary-spike reading: coding agents crossed a threshold around Opus 4.5, much as ChatGPT drove OpenAI past tenfold growth in 2023 before slowing to 3x in 2024; whether growth continues depends on how many such thresholds lie ahead.
A footnote notes 2026 growth may already be slowing: the labs were reportedly about $55B combined at end of Q1 after nearly doubling, then took around four months to double again, still faster than in 2025.
For scale, the post says the whole generative AI market approaches $200B a year, about a thousandth of the world economy, and naive 3x annual growth would reach the size of today's world economy in about six years, framed as a lens, not a forecast.
