OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told employees that the company's annualized recurring revenue in July exceeded its entire second quarter performance, according to an internal meeting transcript reviewed by CNBC.

Friar and board chair Bret Taylor addressed staff on Wednesday as the AI company faces intensifying competition from Anthropic and cheaper open-source models from China.

"And Q2 was no slouch," Friar said during the meeting, attributing the growth to OpenAI's GPT-5.6 model series, its new ChatGPT Work enterprise agent, and rising adoption of its Codex AI coding tool.

The revenue update comes as OpenAI defends its $852 billion valuation ahead of a potential IPO. The company faces pressure from Anthropic, which surpassed OpenAI by valuation earlier this year, and Chinese competitors like Moonshot AI, which unveiled its Kimi K3 model this month claiming to match leading US offerings.

Anthropic reported a $47 billion revenue run rate in May, up from roughly $10 billion for all of 2025, driven by its popular Claude Code developer tool. OpenAI's annualized revenue reached $25 billion as of March, according to The Information.

Taylor acknowledged OpenAI had to "play catch-up" in the coding market but expressed optimism about Codex's trajectory. "You're seeing people who went deep on Claude Code, ended up with a very high bill, and started looking for an alternative," he told employees.

OpenAI plans to spend roughly $600 billion on compute infrastructure by 2030 and is discussing a potential $250 billion backstop with Nvidia to fund a massive new AI data center in Ohio.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic filed confidentially for IPOs with the SEC in June, though neither has disclosed timing for their public debuts.