Anthropic’s revenue run rate rockets past $65 billion, pulling ahead of OpenAI for the first time

Welcome to the AI Industry Report, the daily brief built by AI, about AI, from the Agentic Marketing Academy. It’s Wednesday, August 19th. Four stories today, and the first one is a changing of the guard at the top of the AI industry. Let’s go.

For most of this year, when people argued about which AI company was winning, they meant ChatGPT versus everyone else. That argument just got harder to make. Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate, basically what a full year would look like if the last few months kept going, crossed 65 billion dollars at the end of July. A year ago, that number was 9 billion. In May, it was 47 billion. OpenAI grew too, don’t get it twisted, its own run rate doubled over the same stretch, but only to 40 billion. Both companies have already filed the paperwork to go public, and word is Anthropic will get there first, chasing a valuation north of 2 trillion dollars. Here’s what’s actually worth your attention in that number, though. A big chunk of Anthropic’s growth isn’t coming from people chatting with Claude the way they chat with ChatGPT. It’s coming from Claude Code and real enterprise agent work, businesses plugging Claude into actual operations, not just asking it questions. If you’re deciding which AI tool deserves a real seat in how your business runs, that’s a different, and arguably more useful, signal than which chatbot has more monthly users. Source: TechCrunch, citing Bloomberg, reporting from August 17th.

Now, an update on a legal fight we flagged back on August 6th. That’s when the Ninth Circuit ruled that Perplexity’s Comet browser could keep shopping on Amazon on a user’s behalf, the first time a federal appeals court said an AI agent acting for a person doesn’t count as that company illegally hacking into a website. Amazon didn’t just accept that. On August 18th, it asked the court to rehear the case, arguing the ruling guts a business’s ability to decide how AI agents get to touch its systems in the first place. Nothing about eligibility or access changes today, this is Amazon fighting to get the decision reversed, not a new ruling. But it tells you the rulebook for agents buying on your behalf, or on your website, is still being actively contested in court, not settled. Source: MLex, reporting dated August 18th.

Two quick, practical ones to close on. Google finally pulled the plug on its old Content API for Shopping on August 18th, the deadline it had been warning about for months. If your store, especially an older Shopify setup, was still feeding product data through that pipe instead of the newer Merchant API, your listings may have quietly stopped updating this week, and it won’t look like a penalty from the outside. Worth a five minute check in Merchant Center today. Source: Google’s own Merchant Center Help page.

And Google also kicked off its third spam update of the year on August 18th, rolling out globally across every language over the next few days. Google says it’s not adding new rules, just getting sharper at catching sites already breaking the existing ones. If your rankings wobble this week, check this before you panic about anything else. Source: Google Search Central, posting on X, August 18th.

So here’s your one thing for today. If you sell products through Google Shopping, log into Merchant Center right now and confirm your feed is actually updating, don’t wait for a slow sales week to notice it broke.

That’s today’s report. Transcript and every source linked at A I industry report dot com.

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