Anthropic just passed OpenAI in revenue. Neither company is profitable.

Yesterday I posted about who is actually winning financially from AI right now. The infrastructure layer: AWS, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia. All profitable. All paid regardless of whether your AI deployment succeeds.

Today the application layer numbers tell a more complicated story.

Anthropic just passed OpenAI in revenue. $30 billion annualized run rate as of April 2026, up from $1 billion just 15 months ago. OpenAI is at $25 billion. Both numbers represent growth rates that have no precedent in the history of enterprise software.

But neither company is profitable yet.

OpenAI projects $14 billion in losses for 2026 alone. Cumulative losses through 2029 are projected at $44 billion. Breakeven pushed to 2030 at the earliest. Anthropic is in better shape: projecting positive free cash flow by 2027, with training costs roughly four times lower than OpenAI for comparable output.

The difference in efficiency is striking. Same race. One company spending four times more to run it.

Both are built on top of hyperscaler infrastructure. Every dollar of revenue they generate runs through AWS, Google, or Microsoft first. The infrastructure layer gets paid on the way up regardless of what happens next.

The application layer is still proving itself. The numbers are extraordinary. The losses are too.