Fewer users, fatter wallets is why Anthropic tops OpenAI in LLM revenue stakes

The Register · 2 months ago

Anthropic generated more LLM revenue than OpenAI in Q1 2026 with a 31.4 percent market share compared to OpenAI's 29 percent, despite having roughly 134 million monthly users versus OpenAI's 900 million. Anthropic extracts an average of $16.20 revenue per active user monthly, significantly higher than OpenAI's $2.20, Microsoft's $5, and Google's $1.10. The shift reveals that success in LLM markets increasingly depends on extracting higher revenue from smaller, premium customer bases rather than maximizing user scale, while major infrastructure investors like Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft face pressure to justify 77 percent year-over-year spending increases totaling $725 billion in 2026.