OpenAI had ‘rough’ first half of year before coding takeoff, Brockman Says

The OpenAI co-founder and president talks about the realization that Anthropic was going to bypass them in revenue this year and how OpenAI is recovering. OpenAI struggled through a “pretty rough” first half of the year, according to co-founder and President Greg Brockman, a period when rival Anthropic pulled ahead with business customers. It wasn’t until the third quarter that OpenAI’s new tools for agentic software coding found traction—leading to enterprise overtaking consumer sales as the company’s biggest revenue driver, Brockman said Wednesday at the WSJ Tech conference.“If you look at what’s really changed this year, Q1 was pretty rough, Q2 was pretty rough—it really looked in many ways, like coding, we weren’t really even in the conversation,” said Brockman.