Brockman Says OpenAI's Rough First Half Ended With a 70 Percent Q3 Revenue Rebound as Enterprise Overtakes Consumers

OpenAI president Greg Brockman has given an unusually candid account of the company's year: the first half of 2026 was, in his words, "pretty rough." Speaking at the Wall Street Journal's Tech conference on Wednesday, Brockman said the trouble was most visible in coding — the very market that later rescued the company's numbers.

"Q1 was pretty rough, Q2 was pretty rough — it really looked in many ways like coding, we weren't even in the conversation," Brockman said. "We had Codex, but no one was talking about it." He added that it became clear early in the year that Anthropic, which rode its enterprise coding business to a revenue lead, would overtake OpenAI this year. Anthropic is now preparing an IPO that could come as soon as this month.

The third quarter was, he said, "entirely different." OpenAI's annualized revenue grew about 70 percent quarter over quarter, with enterprise revenue doubling, according to Brockman — spoken figures with no dollar base or audit behind them, so they should be treated as company claims. The turnaround, he argued, was seeded earlier: the release of frontier model GPT-5.6 Sol and the ChatGPT Work product line finally gave the enterprise push something to sell. The result, Brockman said, is that enterprise sales have overtaken consumer subscriptions as OpenAI's largest revenue source.

Third-party data supports part of the story. A September analysis by OpenRouter, which tracks spending across some 120,000 companies using both providers' tools, found OpenAI's and Anthropic's share roughly even — a sharp change from the start of the year, when Anthropic commanded about three-quarters of that spending.

Brockman pointed to a new strategic partnership with JPMorgan Chase, including access to OpenAI's cybersecurity-focused models through its Daybreak program. Notably, JPMorgan is also a partner in Anthropic's rival Project Glasswing — an illustration of how large enterprises are hedging across both labs.

The financing picture is messier. OpenAI has raised less than half of the $30 billion it targeted in its latest round, the Journal has reported, valuing the company at $1.25 trillion — below the $1.4 trillion it originally sought — and it is now trying to raise $20 billion. Brockman said OpenAI filed IPO paperwork in June and now aims to list in 2027. "We want to go public when it's the right time for us," he said, adding that he had "never felt more confident."

Brockman also addressed his decision to cancel a planned second $25 million donation to Leading the Future, the pro-AI super PAC that spent heavily in this week's midterms with mixed results. In a Slack message to staff he acknowledged the group had become a distraction; on stage he framed the reversal around perception — safety and innovation "go hand-in-hand," he said, and the PAC came across as opposing that.

For a company that spent the first half of 2026 watching its closest rival define the enterprise conversation, the message from the conference was deliberate: the coding war is not over, the revenue curve has bent back up, and the IPO clock now runs to 2027. Investors will want audited numbers — but the narrative reset is itself the point.