In an internal meeting with employees on Wednesday, OpenAI’s finance chief Sarah Friar and board chair Bret Taylor touted the company’s revenue growth and addressed competition with Anthropic. Friar said OpenAI’s annualized recurring revenue in July exceeded the entire second quarter, adding, “And Q2 was no slouch,” according to a partial transcript reviewed by CNBC. The momentum was driven by the release of the GPT-5.6 series of models, the new enterprise agent ChatGPT Work, and growing adoption of its AI coding tool, Codex. OpenAI is under pressure to justify its $852 billion valuation as it gears up for a potentially massive IPO. The company faces competition from Anthropic, Google, and lower-cost open-weight models from China, including Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3. In February, OpenAI told investors it plans to target roughly $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030 and is in discussions with Nvidia about a backstop of up to $250 billion for a new AI data center in Ohio. Anthropic, which surpassed OpenAI by valuation earlier this year, said in May its revenue run rate topped $47 billion. Taylor acknowledged OpenAI had to play catch-up in the coding market but said he is encouraged by Codex’s growth, noting people who went deep on Claude Code ended up with a very high bill and started looking for an alternative.