Inside OpenAI’s race to catch up to Claude Code
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Altman and I are in an enormous conference room. The question I put to him is about the AI coding revolution—and why OpenAI doesn’t seem to be leading it. Millions of software engineers have started delegating their programming tasks to AI, forcing many in Silicon Valley to reckon with the automation of their jobs for the first time. Coding agents have emerged as one of the few areas where enterprises are willing to pay a lot for AI.
This moment could, and arguably should, be the next triumphant poster along the stairs for OpenAI. But the name in big print right now belongs to someone else.
Anthropic, a smaller rival started by OpenAI defectors, has found runaway success with its programming agent, Claude Code. The product accounts for nearly a fifth of its business—more than $2.5 billion in annualized revenue, the company said in February.
By the end of January, OpenAI’s version, Codex, was bringing in just over $1 billion in annualized revenue, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
What gives?
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