Recent disclosures from OpenAI (OPENAI) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) show how far ahead the ChatGPT maker is ahead of the search giant in the race for consumers. However, Google is not standing still.
OpenAI is winning the consumer battle
At OpenAI’s recent developer day, the company announced that its API platform was processing 6B tokens each minute, up 20 times over the past two years. The company also said that ChatGPT had surpassed 800M weekly active users.
In comparison, Google said recently it was processing 1.3 quadrillion tokens each month across all of its services, including AI Overviews, Gemini, and the API platform on Google Cloud.
“In piecing together these datapoints, we estimate that while OpenAI is dominating consumer AI token consumption (2x+ the size of Google Gemini), Google processes the most tokens out of the AI labs by a wide margin,” Barclays analyst Ross Sandler wrote in a note to clients. “The lead in aggregate inference tokens is likely from the 2B+ search users generating AI Overviews (2B users disclosed on the 2Q25 call and estimated to be closer to 2.5B users currently), accounting for 900T (~70%) of the 1.3Q monthly tokens. The market share of native consumer AI applications likely tips much more towards OpenAI.”
Tokens explained
Tokens are units of data — such as words, parts of words, or punctuation — that are used by language models to process text. They are largely responsible for driving economics in artificial intelligence, including cost and revenue.
Delving deeper, Sandler estimated that ChatGPT is generated more than 420T inference tokens each month from its 800M weekly users. (He also estimated that the service could have 1.2B monthly users). That is more than double the roughly 190T tokens that Gemini is generating from an estimated 550M monthly users.
On Alphabet’s most recent earnings call, the company disclosed the Gemini app had surpassed 450M monthly users, with daily requests up 50% from the prior quarter.
Enterprise is Anthropic’s race to lose
While the competition for consumer-generated tokens appears is being led by OpenAI, that’s not the case in the enterprise. Anthropic (ANTHRO) is leading by a wide margin.
Anthropic has “nearly” double the revenue share when compared to OpenAI, as evidenced by recent reporting. The company is on pace to reach an internal goal of a $9B annualized revenue run rate by the end of 2025, and could generate as much as $20B in annualized revenue by the end of 2026.
The company, which launched its Claude chatbot in March 2023, said its revenue run-rate had reached more than $5B as of August. Anthropic also said that it has more than 300,000 business customers and the number of customers that spend more than $100,000 with it had grown “nearly” seven times in the past year.
As such, Anthropic is leading the enterprise space by a “decent margin when it comes to inference tokens,” Sandler estimated.