OpenAI is now pulling in $25 billion on an annualized basis. They're talking about going public as soon as late this year. GPT-5.5 dropped, and they're loosening up the old Microsoft exclusivity so AWS and maybe Google can carry their stuff too.
This matters because AI is no longer a side bet. It's a real business with real cash flow and real distribution muscle behind it. The Microsoft loosening is the bigger story to me. When the biggest model maker shows up everywhere, the rest of the stack has to compete on something other than access.
My take: the IPO chatter is fine, but watch the distribution moves. Whoever owns the pipes wins the next round. OpenAI just made sure they're not stuck on one set of pipes.
Anthropic Is Right Behind at $19 Billion
Anthropic is closing in on $19 billion ARR. That's not a rounding error. That's a serious number for a company a lot of folks still call the underdog.
This matters because we now have two giants minting cash, not one. Last year people argued there was only room for one frontier lab. That argument is done. Both can run at scale, and the competition is making both better.
My take: I run Claude in my own stuff, and I'm not the only one. Enterprises clearly picked it up because Anthropic's revenue isn't growing on hobby projects. The real fight from here is who lands the boring, sticky enterprise workloads.
Agentic AI Finally Quit Talking and Started Working
GTC 2026 was wall to wall agent talk. Fortune 500 outfits announced actual production deployments in manufacturing, logistics, and finance. Not pilots, not pitch decks. Real systems doing real work.
This matters because for two years agents have been the next big thing that never showed up. Now they're showing up. When a finance team puts an agent in front of accounts payable, that's not a demo, that's payroll.
My take: I've been skeptical of agent hype since day one. Most of what got called an agent was a fancy if statement with a chatbot bolted on. But the production deployments are different. If a logistics shop is letting an agent reroute trucks, the trust threshold finally moved. About time.