🍭 OpenAI's IPO Just Got Harder 🚨

Good morning. Turns out you can lose the lead while everyone is still describing you as the leader.

Let’s dive in 👇

🍭 What’s Cookin’:

• Anthropic quietly took the top line while nobody was looking

• Groq raised again, at half what it used to be worth

• Microsoft patched a Copilot hole it had known about since December

OpenAI & Anthropic
👑 First Place Has A New Owner

The Bite:

OpenAI told investors its second-quarter revenue reached $6.7 billion, up 18% from the first quarter. Its operating loss widened to $12.3 billion, from $9.3 billion in Q1.

Anthropic posted $11.6 billion in second-quarter revenue, more than double its first quarter. Anthropic also reported an operating profit of $559 million, its first.

Both sets of figures come from sources familiar with the companies' finances, according to the Wall Street Journal and CNBC.

Neither company discloses financials publicly.

It is the first quarter in which Anthropic's revenue has exceeded OpenAI's.

Snacks:

• Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate topped $65 billion in July, more than 50% higher than OpenAI's.

• That run rate is up more than 7x from the end of last year.

• OpenAI's losses grew faster than its revenue: 32% sequential loss growth against 18% revenue growth.

• Anthropic attributes the profit to more efficient use of its compute, without disclosing the calculation method.

• OpenAI has raised roughly $180 billion to date, much of it committed to data centers and cloud contracts.

• OpenAI told investors growth accelerated after its July model launch, but provided no figures.

Why it Bites:

Anthropic didn't win the top line by selling more.
It won by not paying for the audience.

OpenAI's hundreds of millions of free users were the whole argument for a while: scale first, monetize later, and nobody else could afford to catch up.

That worked until the bill arrived. The loss is largely from serving people who will never pay, and that cost is growing faster than the revenue it was supposed to buy.

Anthropic never had that audience. It sold to companies that expense the subscription and renew it. The $559 million operating profit is small enough to be a rounding error and important enough to reprice the entire race.

Free users stopped being a moat the moment somebody proved you didn't need them.

And every quarter that stays true, the IPO looks less like a victory lap and more like a deadline.

Steal This Prompt
💥 Classic Comic-Style Art

Turn any portrait into a vintage comic-book hero shot with bold outlines, halftone dots, explosive backgrounds, and “main character just heard the plot twist” energy.

Use it to:

• Make profile pics look like they survived a radioactive printing press

• Turn founders, creators, or pets into comic-cover icons

• Create punchy visuals for newsletters, thumbnails, and launch posts

Workflow:

1. Hit this link: Classic Comic-Style Art

2. Paste into your AI model

3. Replace the #s with your photo/details

4. Watch it cook into pop-art chaos with cheekbones

   Try the prompt on Snack Prompt

_ToolBox™
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_{Everything Else}
🧠 You Need to Know

🔓 Microsoft Patches One-Click Copilot Data Theft Flaw
→ Microsoft shipped fixes for a chain that let one link run attacker prompts inside Copilot Personal and pull data from connected accounts, eight months late.

💸 Groq Raises $350M At Half Its Peak Value
→ The August 17 round led by Disruptive values Groq at $3.5 billion, down from $6.9 billion last September, months after Nvidia licensed its chip technology and hired its founder.

📚 OpenAI Growth Slows As Anthropic Passes It
→ OpenAI told investors second-quarter revenue rose 18% to $6.7 billion while its operating loss widened to $12.3 billion, as Anthropic's $11.6 billion quarter overtook it in sales for the first time.

⚡ Cerebras Unveils CS-4 Inference Accelerator
→ The rack packs three Wafer Scale Engine 3 Turbo processors and claims twice the tokens per second of the CS-3 on the same 5-nanometer wafer.

🦾 Unitree Closes Up 460% In Shanghai Debut
→ The humanoid robot maker raised about $905 million and opened 629% above its 150.8 yuan offer price on August 19 before closing up 460%.