OpenAI's July ARR Tops Q2 Amid GPT-5.6 and Codex Growth

OpenAI's CFO Sarah Friar announced during an internal meeting that July's annualized recurring revenue (ARR) surpassed the second-quarter level, with board chair Bret Taylor attributing growth to the GPT-5.6 series models, the enterprise AI agent ChatGPT Work, and the coding tool Codex. The company is aggressively expanding its enterprise and developer customer base to support massive AI infrastructure investments, aiming for roughly $600 billion in total compute spending by 2030. OpenAI is also in discussions with Nvidia for up to $250 billion in funding to lease a large AI data center in Ohio.

OpenAI faces intensifying competition from Anthropic, whose Claude Code coding assistant drove its revenue run rate above $47 billion in 2025, and from Chinese developer Moonshot AI, whose Kimi K3 model outperforms leading US AI systems on selected benchmarks. Taylor acknowledged Anthropic's lead in AI coding tools but noted that OpenAI's Codex is gaining traction as users seek alternatives to high-cost Claude Code bills. Meanwhile, OpenAI has confidentially filed IPO documents with the SEC, though the timeline remains undecided, as it works to justify its $852 billion valuation.