Name: Why The OpenAI And Anthropic Rivalry Is Heating Up
Uploaded: 2026-02-23T00:55:14.000Z
Duration: 5 min 2 s
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The most high profile rivalry in tech is heating up in 2026 as both OpenAI and Anthropic Race ahead on what are poised to be historic IPOs.

These AI giants are trying to create the fastest, smartest and best models, spending billions and then raising billions from investors along the way.

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We've seen some signals that it's anything but friendly competition.

In January, OpenAI began unveiling plans to introduce ads for free users and ChatGPT Go subscribers in the United States, an opportunity to pull in crucial revenue as that company faces down $1.4 trillion in AI.

Build out commitments OpenAI CFO Sarah Fryer stressing to CNBC that the ads would not influence the responses given to users.

Northstar is the model always gives you the best answer, not the paid for answer that has to remain Goal one We don't share conversations with advertisers.

Meanwhile, Anthropic announcing in no uncertain terms that its own flagship chatbot, Claude, would remain ad free, it went a step further, spending millions on super bowl ads that never mention OpenAI but take clear aim at the rival lab.

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman punching back on X, writing that the ads are deceptive and calling Anthropic an expensive product for rich people.

It's one of the most public displays yet of the animus.

These two startups that have helped define the emerging industry until now had been quietly competing behind the scenes.

The tension goes all the way back to 2020.

That was when OpenAI's then Vice President of research, Dario Amade, left with his sister Daniela and more than a dozen senior senior researchers.

The split was driven by concerns over AI safety and OpenAI's increased commercialization.

The Amadeus, along with five former OpenAI employees, co founded Anthropic in 2021 as a public benefit corporation, in part to resist some of those pressures.

But Anthropic is now a corporate giant itself, and the headbutting really comes down to competing for businesses.

In early February, Anthropic dropped Claude 4.6 Opus and OpenAI unveiled its own ChatGPT 5.3 Codex.

One company has been a clear viral standout in enterprise.

Anthropic's Claude has emerged as one of the most favored AI platforms for the enterprise.

Anthropic comes out with something like Claude code and cowork that shows just how powerful another model company can be.

That guy Claude is very busy destroying a lot of companies.

The fanfare around Claude starting just weeks after the November release of Google's Gemini 3, prompted a code red inside of OpenAI.

Internally, Altman has been telling employees that the giant returned to monthly growth.

And OpenAI is in talks to raise capital which could value it at an eye popping.

$800 billion ChatGPT does lead the consumer market, but winning over that core enterprise customer.

It's going to be a crucial source of revenue for both of these companies.

They're more profitable versus consumers paying 20 bucks a month.

And businesses tend to be stickier, meaning there's more recurring revenue.

CEO Dario Amadei has told CNBC that enterprise makes up 80% of Anthropic's business, while OpenAI CFO Sarah Fryer says she's aiming to have a 5,050 split by the end of this year.

At the end of last year, sitting right here, I would have said our business 5050 consumer enterprise, or sorry, 7030 consumer enterprise.

Today that number 6040 I think will end the year closer to 5050.

OpenAI has taken a much more aggressive tack on spending for compute, which Fire also says translates to revenue.

Anthropic has been a bit more conservative and executives are increasingly comfortable highlighting those differences.

We made less flashy headlines than some and you know, we've been focused on on growing revenue and winning business rather than spending money and announcing the biggest compute deals that we possibly could.

These companies have gone head to head, raising hundreds of billions of dollars in private markets and to have the best AI models.

The next leg of this race is their potential 2026 IPOs.

Anthropic and OpenAI could hit public markets and as early as the end of this year, according to sources.

But both will debut at sky high valuations and cash burn investors.

Most of those companies have told me that they want to be the first to explain their story to Wall street.

How to value these companies, how to justify some of those losses.

And one banker compared this IPO parade to the fierce competition between Uber and lyft back in 2019.

Lyft was able to list a month before Uber and then set the public market benchmark despite being a smaller company.

On the other hand, some bankers say might be good to let your rival go out and test the waters first.