Anthropic, a leading artificial intelligence startup, has reached an estimated $3 billion in annualized revenue, according to two sources. This figure is based on the company’s current monthly sales projected over a full year. The company’s growth has been rapid—up from $1 billion in December 2024, to $2 billion by the end of March, and now $3 billion by the end of May.

This sharp increase highlights growing business demand for generative AI, especially in contrast to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has seen more consumer use than business integration. Anthropic’s revenue mainly comes from offering its AI models as a service to other businesses, especially for code generation, a use case that has seen high adoption recently.

Anthropic, supported by major investors like Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Amazon, has gained attention for building AI tools that are particularly good at programming tasks. These tools are contributing to its strong performance in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market. In fact, some venture capitalists have noted that the speed of Anthropic’s revenue growth is unmatched among public SaaS companies.

Alex Clayton, a general partner at Meritech (not an investor in Anthropic), remarked that based on their data from over 200 public software IPOs, such rapid growth is unprecedented. While Anthropic does make some money from consumer subscriptions to its Claude chatbot, most of its revenue is enterprise-based. For comparison, SaaS firm Snowflake took about a year and a half to grow from $1B to $2B in annualized revenue.

Anthropic’s main competitor, OpenAI, reportedly aims to reach $12 billion in total revenue by the end of 2025, up from $3.7 billion last year. However, unlike Anthropic’s annualized figure, this number is a full-year estimate. While OpenAI hasn’t disclosed enterprise-specific revenue, it recently announced that over 3 million users are now paying for its enterprise-level ChatGPT product, including companies like T-Mobile and Morgan Stanley.

In the consumer market, OpenAI’s ChatGPT leads, with far more web traffic than Claude. In April, Claude received only about 2% of ChatGPT’s traffic, according to Similarweb.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group that split from OpenAI due to different views on AI development. Earlier this year, Anthropic raised $3.5 billion in funding, which brought its valuation to $61.4 billion. OpenAI, in comparison, is currently valued at $300 billion.