CFO Sarah Friar and board chair Bret Taylor told employees momentum came from GPT-5.6, ChatGPT Work and Codex as the company pushes back against Anthropic and cheaper open-source rivals.
OpenAI told employees that business momentum strengthened in July, with CFO Sarah Friar saying annualized recurring revenue for the month was higher than the company generated across the whole second quarter. In a Wednesday internal meeting, Friar and board chair Bret Taylor highlighted growth tied to the GPT-5.6 model series, the enterprise-focused agent ChatGPT Work, and rising use of coding tool Codex. The update comes as OpenAI tries to reassure staff that it can sustain growth while competition intensifies from Anthropic, Google and lower-cost open-weight models (AI models whose weights are shared for use) from China. Taylor acknowledged Anthropic's strong start to the year and said OpenAI had to catch up in coding, but pointed to Codex as an encouraging sign. He said some users who went heavily into Claude Code faced high bills and began seeking alternatives. OpenAI is under pressure to support its $852 billion valuation ahead of a potentially large IPO and to generate enough revenue to fund heavy infrastructure expansion. The company told investors in February that it was targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spend (AI processing capacity costs) by 2030, and CNBC previously reported it is discussing a backstop of up to $250 billion with Nvidia to help support plans for a new AI data center in Ohio. Both OpenAI and Anthropic confidentially filed for IPOs with the Securities and Exchange Commission (U.S. markets regulator) in June.