OpenAI, the company that made artificial intelligence a household topic with ChatGPT, has fallen behind rival Anthropic on revenue growth and valuation, according to a Wall Street Journal report by Berber Jin.
The reason, according to sources cited in that reporting, comes down to where each company placed its bets. OpenAI prioritized consumer chatbots and what the Journal describes as "flashy side projects." Those choices overshadowed the opportunity in AI coding tools — software that helps developers write and ship code — and Anthropic moved into that gap and captured the lead.
The framing is echoed in coverage aggregated by Techmeme and in a version of the story carried on MSN under the headline "How OpenAI lost its AI crown—and the fight to win it back." That last phrase matters: the reporting presents this as a contest still in progress, not a settled outcome, with OpenAI working to recover ground.
The sources here do not provide specific revenue figures, valuation numbers, or named executives, so the picture is directional rather than quantitative. What they establish is the shape of the competitive story: two leading AI labs, two different strategic reads of where the money is, and a rival pulling ahead on the less glamorous one.
Why it matters: consumer chatbots are the face of the AI boom, but this reporting suggests the durable revenue is coming from businesses paying for AI that writes software — a signal about where the industry's real economics, and the next round of competition, are likely to sit.