OpenAI pushes enterprise growth as competition with Anthropic intensifies

OpenAI is shifting from a race for attention to a fight for permanence. Denise Dresser told employees the market is “as competitive as I have ever seen it” and pressed the company to lock in users, expand its enterprise business and build a moat around its AI products as Anthropic sharpens the challenge.

The company’s latest internal message points to a strategic reset inside the AI boom. Dresser described a business model built around Frontier as the intelligence layer powering customer agents, with a unified AI superapp serving as the primary employee interface. That is a bet that the next phase of competition will be won not by flashy model launches, but by becoming the software companies rely on every day.

OpenAI’s enterprise push already has scale. In an April 8 note, Dresser said enterprise made up more than 40% of revenue and was on track to reach parity with consumer revenue by the end of 2026. OpenAI also said Codex had reached 3 million weekly active users and that its APIs now process more than 15 billion tokens per minute. The company said it was seeing demand from Goldman Sachs, Phillips and State Farm, while existing customers including Cursor, DoorDash, Thermo Fisher and LY Corporation were expanding their use.

That growth has sharpened the stakes with Anthropic, which OpenAI has increasingly cast as its most direct rival in enterprise AI. Both companies are trying to convince investors that enterprise adoption can translate into durable margins and a sustainable business model, especially as they prepare for possible initial public offerings as soon as this year. OpenAI was valued at more than $850 billion in a late-March fundraising round, while Anthropic was valued at $380 billion about a month earlier.

Distribution is now central to the fight. Dresser said OpenAI’s Amazon partnership is a key growth engine for enterprise, while its long-running Microsoft relationship has “limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are,” especially for customers using Amazon Web Services’ Bedrock platform. OpenAI said inbound demand for the Amazon offering had been “frankly staggering” after Amazon announced plans in late February to invest up to $50 billion in the company. Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019.

Dresser, who became chief revenue officer on December 9, 2025 after leading sales at Slack and Salesforce, now oversees global revenue strategy across enterprise and customer success. OpenAI said more than one million business customers are already using its technology. The message is clear: the AI race is entering a consolidation phase, and the winner will be the company that turns model quality into indispensable infrastructure.