Does ChatGPT make money? Yet?

Until recently for every dollar Open AI earned (ChatGPT gross revenue) they lost about 65 cents. The same was true for Anthropic (Claude). In the past year, Claude has started to turn a profit.

Both platforms are approaching their four year anniversary from launch.

How does this compare to the trajectory of Amazon, which also operated at a loss as it was growing and gaining traction? The company launched in 2001 took approx 6.5 years to clock it's first profitable quarter and 8.5 years to garner a profitable year.

OpenAI Continues to Suffer Heavy Losses as Revenue Rises to $10 Billion

The company improved its adjusted operating margin but remains far off from profitability

By Berber Jin, WSJ

Updated Nov. 10, 2026

OpenAI grew revenue by roughly 50% to $10 billion from the second to the third quarter.

OpenAI grew revenue by roughly 50% to $10 billion from the second to the third quarter, but continued to report heavy operating losses, showing mixed results in its effort to catch up with industry leader Anthropic.

The company shared its latest results with investors on Tuesday, just as Anthropic was preparing to mount its much-anticipated IPO next week. The maker of Claude recently disclosed that its revenue rose to $17 billion in the third quarter while reporting a smaller operating loss of $567 million during that period.

The numbers show that OpenAI is accelerating revenue growth but still has a long way to go to match its rival’s sales and operating efficiency. The company grew revenue by only 18% in the second quarter compared with the first, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

OpenAI told investors Tuesday that its adjusted operating margin improved from minus 150% to minus 109% from the second to the third quarter, according to documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Even so, the company’s adjusted operating losses ticked up slightly from $10.1 billion to $10.9 billion, based on those figures.

The calculations for the losses exclude stock-based compensation, which ticked up to $2.6 billion in the third quarter, according to a person familiar with the matter. Anthropic’s operating loss includes stock-based compensation.

OpenAI is racing to gain ground against Anthropic in the lucrative enterprise market for AI products and has cut the prices of its latest models in an effort to grow market share. The company recently hired a new chief revenue officer, Dali Rajic, to focus on this business segment, which is steadily accounting for a larger share of the company’s overall sales.

OpenAI also told investors that the number of paying users on ChatGPT grew to roughly 100 million, or 8.5% of total weekly active users. That percentage is slightly higher than what OpenAI reported for the previous quarter, suggesting progress in its effort to increase paying subscribers for the world’s most popular consumer chatbot.

OpenAI earlier this year also launched advertising on ChatGPT, which the company expects to improve margins, though results for that segment of the business couldn’t be learned.

The company is preparing to list shares publicly next year and is hoping that new business momentum will help it regain the lead in the AI race. Anthropic’s sales surged past OpenAI earlier this year on the heels of its popular coding tool Claude Code. Anthropic has run a more efficient business than OpenAI, even turning a small operating profit in the second quarter.

OpenAI has a large consumer business to support and maintains an array of research programs in areas from robotics to image generation. Anthropic has taken a more focused approach on building for enterprises, though its revenue is more concentrated on those customers as a result.

Third-party data showed that OpenAI gained ground on Anthropic in the third quarter after some businesses began seeking more cost-efficient alternatives to Claude. At the WSJ Tech conference in Napa Valley earlier this month, OpenAI President Greg Brockman said the first two quarters of the year were rough but that the third quarter saw an “incredible revenue inflection,” and he cited a new partnership with JPMorgan Chase.

In the third quarter of 2025, OpenAI reported $3.9 billion in sales and an operating margin of minus 97%, the documents showed.

Like Anthropic, OpenAI has been hurt by the recent selloff in tech stocks. For its latest financing round, the ChatGPT maker raised less than half of its initial $30 billion target, though it is still seeking new backers to fill out the round. Anthropic, for its part, is targeting a valuation of $1.33 trillion in its public listing, The Wall Street Journal reported, down from the roughly $2 trillion figure that was floated months ago.

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.