OpenAI and Anthropic Have a New Threat to Worry About—and It Isn’t China

A little-known American AI startup is looking to steal frontier AI companies’ bread and butter by letting enterprise customers build their own custom AI models. OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s business models largely revolve around selling AI to business customers, via APIs and enterprise subscriptions. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar reportedly told investors in an August closed-door meeting that while the startup’s revenue had historically been approximately split 60/40 in favor of individual customers, that ratio had recently reversed: “The majority of our revenue is now enterprise,” Friar said, according to CNBC. In February, Anthropic said it had more than 500 business customers who spent more than $1 million annually on API usage or Claude subscriptions.