A group of 34 leading AI startups is now generating nearly $80 billion in annualized revenue. That figure has more than doubled in six months, a 112 percent increase, according to an analysis by The Information. Two companies are taking almost all of it.

Anthropic and OpenAI together account for 89 percent of that total, up 4.5 percentage points from six months ago and up 36.8 points since early 2023 when both companies began full-scale paid services. The remaining 32 companies share 11 percent of the pie.

The Numbers

By company, the annualized revenue breakdown: OpenAI at $55 billion, Anthropic at $15 billion, Cursor at $2.7 billion, Cognition and ElevenLabs each at $500 million. Notably absent from the top five: Elon Musk's xAI. A Ramp survey of 50,000 paid AI model subscribers showed Anthropic at 34.4 percent market share, OpenAI at 32.3 percent, Google at 4.48 percent, and xAI at just 1.93 percent.

These figures include amounts that Microsoft, AWS, and Google Cloud generated by reselling the two companies' models, meaning actual retained revenue may be somewhat lower. In OpenAI's case, contractual terms require it to share about 20 percent of revenue with Microsoft through 2030. Anthropic shares revenue with Amazon and Google through similar cloud distribution agreements.

The Dual-Bet Strategy

The concentration is accelerating, not stabilizing. Major venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Iconiq, and Insight Partners are pursuing what the industry calls a "dual-bet strategy," investing in both Anthropic and OpenAI simultaneously. The logic: if the model layer captures most of the value, you want both horses in the race.

OpenAI raised $122 billion in March at a valuation of $852 billion. Anthropic's valuation has surged from $380 billion to approximately $900 billion, driven by rapid growth of enterprise products like Claude Cowork and Claude Code, combined with favorable reviews of its latest model, Mythos. Both companies are accelerating efforts to improve profitability ahead of planned IPOs later this year.

What It Means for Everyone Else

Beyond the two leaders, Perplexity, ElevenLabs, and Cognition have each crossed the $500 million mark. But the gap between the top two and the rest is widening, not narrowing. The 32 companies splitting 11 percent of an $80 billion market are individually generating meaningful revenue. Collectively, they are a rounding error.

The growth also comes with a cost problem. Anthropic and OpenAI alone burn through more than $30 billion a year, mostly on training and inference compute. Both companies are raising token prices for new models by up to twice the previous level and restricting access to coding tools under flat-rate plans. Price normalization is the polite term. Margin compression forced the issue.

Investors see the numbers as proof that most of the value in AI sits with the model makers, not the application layer. As The Information put it: "Even AI developers themselves are partially or almost entirely dependent on Anthropic and OpenAI models." The moat is the model. The market said so.

Sources: The Information (May 18, 2026), Seoul Economic Daily (Kim Chang-young, May 18, 2026), The Decoder (Maximilian Schreiner, May 18, 2026), MediaPost (May 19, 2026).