Half the market is overpaying for AI. This week, a giant stopped.
AT&T runs AI for 100,000 staff, and it just started routing work to free models instead of paying OpenAI and Anthropic full price.
Which raises the real question underneath this week’s numbers: if nobody’s locked in, who’s actually winning?
Let’s begin.
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🔍 THE BIG READ
The AI Race has Two Leaders and No Winner
Depending on which number you read this week, either company is ahead. That is the whole story.
Anthropic is winning on money. Its Q2 revenue more than doubled to $11.6 billion, with a small operating profit. OpenAI’s revenue grew 18% and its losses widened to $12.3 billion. Anthropic is now telling investors it could hit $200 billion in revenue by 2028. See who wins on Wall Street →
OpenAI is winning back the room. New data from Ramp, covering 70,000 US businesses, shows OpenAI growing faster than Anthropic among corporate users this quarter, after losing that lead back in May. GPT-5.6 Sol has become the default pick for a lot of developers. See the business-share data →
So who is actually ahead? Both. Neither. It flips every time someone ships a model.
Here is the part investors should not love. Businesses are happy to swap sides whenever a better model lands. One analyst called it “Coke and Pepsi,” except nobody’s loyal to either can. For two companies chasing trillion-dollar IPOs on the promise of locked-in revenue, “our customers leave the second a rival improves” is not the story they want told.
And Anthropic just handed OpenAI an opening. Its new Fable 5 model forces 30-day data logging, with no zero-retention option. Regulated industries and privacy-conscious firms balked, and Microsoft restricted internal use. OpenAI countered this week, previewing a system that spots misuse without storing your data at all.
The takeaway: the lead is real, temporary, and up for grabs again next model drop. That is great for you as a buyer. It is a nightmare to price into a stock.
⚡ ALSO HAPPENING
AT&T found a way to stop paying Full Price for AI
AT&T runs AI for 100,000 employees, and it just told the frontier labs its spending stops here.
The company now routes 40% of employee AI requests through free open-source models from Nvidia, Meta, and Google, with a target of 60 to 70% in the next few years.
Its internal platform handles 45 billion tokens a day, and smart routing sends each task to the cheapest model that can do it. On some coding work, that cut costs by 56% for a 2% drop in quality.
The AI boss’s line is the one every frontier lab should worry about: open-source trails the best closed models by six to ten months, and the gap keeps closing.
When your biggest enterprise customers start asking whether every task really needs a premium model, the moat gets shallow fast. Read more →
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🐦 TOP TWEET OF THE WEEK
Generalist AI showed off GEN-1.5, and the wild part is it learns a brand-new task in seconds. Watch the demo and it clicks why “one-shot learning” for robots is such a big deal.
📌 ALSO READ
An AI data startup hit a $500M run rate. Micro1 is riding the boom in demand for the human-labeled data that trains frontier models.
Grok keeps spitting out gibberish. Days after the 4.6 launch, users report the model returning garbled nonsense, an awkward look for SpaceXAI.
ChatGPT can now cut out backgrounds. GPT-Image 2 generates images with transparent backgrounds, a small feature that designers have wanted for ages.
Meta became one of Microsoft’s biggest AI customers. The two rivals are closer than they let on, with Meta spending heavily on Microsoft’s cloud to train its models.
AI found hidden patterns inside breast cancer. UK researchers used AI to map tumor structures the eye misses, work that could sharpen how the disease is diagnosed and treated.
⚒️ WORTH A TRY AI TOOLS
ChatGPT for Teens - OpenAI’s separate, age-appropriate version of ChatGPT, with tighter content rules and parental controls built in.
Flunkey - A voice-first productivity tool for Windows that turns what you say into text, actions, and remembered context anywhere you work. Think Wispr Flow, but you can also ask it questions on the fly.
👋 BEFORE YOU GO
For a year we’ve asked who wins, OpenAI or Anthropic. This week’s answer is the honest one: whoever shipped last.
The race has no finish line yet. It just has a new leader every few weeks, and a lot of investors pretending that’s the same as loyalty.
See you next week.