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Anthropic’s meteoric rise to a $5 billion revenue run rate conceals a precarious dependence on just two major customers that account for nearly a quarter of the artificial intelligence company’s income, according to internal data and industry analysis that reveals both the promise and peril of the AI coding boom.
The San Francisco-based maker of Claude AI assistant has built its business largely on the back of developer tools, with coding applications Cursor and GitHub Copilot driving approximately $1.2 billion of the company’s $4 billion revenue milestone reached earlier this year, according to sources familiar with the matter. The concentration underscores how quickly Anthropic has captured the lucrative market for AI-powered software development, but also exposes the company to significant risk should either relationship falter.
OpenAI and Anthropic both are showing pretty spectacular growth in 2025, with OpenAI doubling ARR in the last 6 months from $6bn to $12bn and Anthropic increasing 5x from $1bn to $5bn in 7 months.If we compare the sources of revenue, the picture is quite interesting:– OpenAI… pic.twitter.com/8OaN1RSm9E— Peter Gostev (@petergostev) August 4, 2025
The revenue concentration comes into sharp focus as OpenAI launched GPT-5 this week with dramatically lower pricing that could undercut Anthropic’s premium positioning. Early comparisons show Claude Opus 4 costs roughly seven times more per million tokens than GPT-5 for certain tasks, creating immediate pressure on Anthropic’s enterprise pricing strategy and potentially threatening its hard-won dominance in AI coding.
The pricing disparity signals a fundamental shift in competitive dynamics that will force enterprise procurement teams to reconsider vendor relationships built on performance rather than price. Companies managing exponentially growing AI budgets now face comparable capability at a fraction of the cost, creating unavoidable pressure in contract negotiations.
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OpenAI’s new GPT-5 models offer dramatically lower pricing than Anthropic’s Claude alternatives, with Claude Opus 4 costing up to 50 times more for output than GPT-5’s most affordable tier …