Sarah Frier, CFO of OpenAI, speaks on CNBC’s Squawk Box at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on January 21, 2026.
Oscar Molina CNBC
as OpenAI The artificial intelligence company, which is chasing internal rival Anthropic and trying to maintain growth in the face of new competition from cheaper open source alternatives, is trying to reassure employees that its business is healthy.
In an internal meeting with employees on Wednesday, Finance Director Sarah Friar and Chairman of the Board Brett Taylor touted OpenAI’s revenue growth and mentioned competition from Anthropic, according to CNBC. Friar said OpenAI’s annualized recurring revenue in July was higher than the entire second quarter.
“The second quarter was no slouch,” Friar said, according to a partial transcript of the meeting reviewed by CNBC.
Frier and Taylor said momentum was driven by the release of the company’s GPT-5.6 series models, a new enterprise agent called ChatGPT Work, and increased adoption of its AI coding tool Codex.
OpenAI is under pressure to justify its $852 billion valuation as it gears up for a potentially massive IPO. The company faces a constantly changing competitive environment that includes humans and humans. google Similarly, there are a number of so-called open weight models made in China that are available at a much lower cost. Earlier this month, China’s Moonshot AI announced Kimi K3. It claims to have closed the gap with leading US products and outperformed the most capable systems from OpenAI and Anthropic on several benchmarks.
OpenAI is eager to bring in new users, especially businesses and developers, to generate the revenue needed to support its infrastructure spending plans, which are being funded by external capital.
OpenAI told investors in February that it plans to drive total computing spending to about $600 billion by 2030. As CNBC reported earlier this week, the company is currently in talks with Nvidia for an up to $250 billion backstop to fund plans to lease a large new AI data center in Ohio.
The staggering numbers and the rapid rise of Anthropic, which surpassed OpenAI in valuation earlier this year, have raised questions about the durability of OpenAI’s business. Anthropic announced in May that its Claude Code tool was such a hit with developers that it generated run-rate revenue of more than $47 billion, exceeding the roughly $10 billion it generated in all of 2025.
The Information reported in March that OpenAI’s annual revenue recently topped $25 billion, citing people familiar with the matter.
Taylor told employees Wednesday that Anthropic is off to a strong start this year and acknowledged that OpenAI needs to make a comeback in the coding market. But he said he is encouraged by Codex’s growth.
“There are people who pursued the Claude Code so hard that they ended up with very high bills and started looking for alternatives,” Taylor said at the meeting.
OpenAI and Anthropic both secretly filed for IPOs with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June. Neither company has provided additional details regarding the planned debut date.
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