An update on AI's most important number

Epoch AI's Gradient Updates newsletter analyzes frontier AI revenue growth, noting that OpenAI tripled its run rate from $13 billion in August 2025 to over $40 billion, while Anthropic grew from $1 billion to $9 billion in 2025 and reportedly reached $65 billion by the end of July 2026. Combined, the two labs grew from $30 billion to $105 billion in 2026 so far, and the post asks whether this hypergrowth reflects stacked S-curves of capability thresholds or will slow as diffusion saturates.