# OpenAI nears a $70B run rate and Anthropic eyes a ~$2T IPO, while agents start picking vendors

*By VC Tech Radar • October 9, 2026*

Frontier-lab revenue and valuations reach new highs, agents become a buying channel, and early-stage funding grows larger: USV raises $900M and Hone closes a $60M seed. Exit signals point in different directions.

## Frontier labs: record revenue, trillion-dollar prices

OpenAI's annualized revenue is reportedly approaching $70B. That would be up more than 70% since the start of Q3, with enterprise sales more than doubling since July [^1]. OpenAI is also reportedly in talks to raise at least $30B at about $1.4T pre-money, as a bridge to an eventual IPO. Anthropic is reportedly targeting a listing as early as mid-November, with a roadshow the week of November 9 and a valuation discussed at $1.8T–$2T [^1].

When asked about the $70B figure, Sam Altman would not confirm or deny it and said he was "very pleased with the growth" [^2]. He said OpenAI wants to be public eventually, but not while it adjusts to new capability levels and safety requirements. He described investors as "very happy with us and very patient" [^2]. In the same interview he referenced holding back Astra 6.1, and said OpenAI will slow training or releases to focus on safety when needed [^2].

On the 20VC/SaaStr panel, Rory O'Driscoll framed the competitive picture this way:
- OpenAI grew only 18% quarter over quarter from Q1 to Q2.
- By his numbers, Anthropic's GAAP revenue overtook OpenAI's in Q2, at roughly $11B against $6.8B.
- Anthropic's Q3 number will be in its prospectus before the stock trades. That matters because teams are reportedly moving work to Codex [^1].

His advice to a hypothetical buyer choosing between the two was to lean toward liquidity [^1].

The State of AI Report 2026 came out the same day. Its headline figures:
- **Lab revenue:** OpenAI's and Anthropic's combined run rates reached about $105B by late summer, up from about $30B at the start of the year.
- **Application companies:** Legora and Sierra each doubled to $200M in about six months; Harvey reached $400M, Lovable reports $600M, and Cursor has been reported above $4B. The report notes that metrics differ across companies [^3].
- **AI-native vs. AI-enabled:** at the 75th percentile in the $1–20M revenue band, AI-native companies grew revenue 256% year over year, versus 90% for AI-enabled firms [^3].

Nathan Benaich's other takeaways from the report:
- Anthropic's internal index says Claude led 26% of measured model R&D in August, with humans supervising [^4].
- He thinks robotics is approaching its "GPT-2 moment" [^5].
- AI-discovered drugs are reaching late-stage trials: Insilico's rentosertib is recruiting for Phase 3. Human trials still have to show these drugs are safe and effective [^6].

## Agents are becoming a buying channel

Vercel says agents went from under 3% of its deployments to more than 50%. On the podcast, Harry Stebbings cited $600M ARR with agents driving half of new business [^1]. Jason Lemkin asked an agent live on the show what to use for hosting. It ranked Render first and Vercel fifth [^1]. His advice to founders is to find 10 people with agents in production and ask them every two weeks what their agents recommend in your category [^1]. Dev Ittycheria warned that the data agents learn from favors incumbents, so startups need documentation and APIs that agents can read easily [^1].

Infrastructure providers are building for this traffic:
- **AWS:** plans $220B in 2026 capex, has two million Nvidia GPUs on order, and says its AI chips are sold out through next year. It is adding a 30-second account signup with no credit card so agents can start using it [^7]. AWS also says it deliberately holds back accelerator capacity for startups rather than selling it all to frontier labs, and says yes in some form to about 60% of startup requests [^8].
- **Token usage:** a16z says agents use nearly 5x the tokens people do, and that this is up 14x in six months [^9].
- **Cloudflare:** non-human traffic passed human traffic on its network in May 2026, more than a year earlier than its own forecast [^10]. It is building agent payments (Monetization Gateway and Wallets), but this layer has no revenue yet [^10].

Agent reliability is still a weak point. Microsoft authors introduced ThinkingBox, a benchmark of 507 business workflows that runs each task 20 times:
- Kimi-K3 solved 93.89% of tasks at least once but only 13.41% on all 20 attempts. Claude Opus 5 solved fewer (79.09%) but repeated far more reliably (47.53%). Ranking models by either measure gives nearly opposite leaderboards [^11].
- 67.24% of failures ended cleanly, so a simple "did it finish" check would have scored them as successes [^11].
- The tasks are synthetic reconstructions of enterprise workflows, not production traffic [^11].

For diligence, this means one-off agent demos say little about whether an agent works reliably.

## Venture: bigger funds, big seeds, mixed exits

**USV raised $900M in new funds. Its last core fund was $275M** [^12]. USV's explanation is that AI has made building easier, which has raised demand for the best companies and led to "bigger rounds and higher prices" [^12]. It will make about the same number of investments, but lead more rounds and back capital-intensive robotics, manufacturing and energy companies [^12]. Its energy thesis, previously run through a dedicated fund, moves into the core fund [^12].

**Hone** launched Engines: the customer points the product at a business metric and it builds its own agents to move it. Hone announced a **$60M seed** led by Benchmark and Index [^13].

**Exits and secondaries:**
- **Listen Labs:** Salesforce agreed to buy the three-year-old AI market-research company for a reported ~$2B. Listen Labs had walked away from a signed Series C term sheet at $1.5B, and its revenue was estimated at about $30M annualized [^1]. Dev Ittycheria expects more deals like this, because many AI apps are features built on someone else's platform [^1].
- **ElevenLabs:** closed a $300M employee tender at $22B, double its February Series D valuation [^1].
- **Oura:** postponed a $2.2B IPO that was about four times oversubscribed, despite $1.21B in revenue for nine months, up 74% [^1]. Jason Lemkin called it a hole in the "liquidity is back" story [^1]. Ittycheria said price was the likely reason, but stressed that he was speculating [^1].
- **Groq/Nvidia lawsuit:** two former Groq engineers sued over Nvidia's $20B license-and-hire deal ($17B license, $3B in RSUs for 150–200 engineers) [^1]. Panelists said founders should expect employees to ask what happens to their equity in deals like this [^1].
- **Secondaries demand:** in SetterVC's Q3 ranking, Anthropic was #1 for a third straight quarter. Etched debuted at #13 and Hadrian rose nine spots to #11. Kalshi fell 16 spots and Polymarket 24 [^14].

An unverified anecdote: Kenan Saleh says an unnamed company selling "frontier data" to AI labs went from $0 to $60M in three months and will reach a $100M run rate this month [^15].

## Model pricing: a caveat on Haiku 5.5

The prior brief covered Haiku 5.5's launch. The new detail is Artificial Analysis's evaluation. It scored the model 43 at max effort, ahead of GPT-6 Luna at 38 [^16]. But at max effort Haiku used about 162k output tokens per task, roughly 3x Luna [^16]. Cost-per-task numbers are still pending because the evaluation does not yet account for the 5x price step above 100K tokens [^16]. When comparing per-token prices, check cost per completed task.

---

### Sources

[^1]: [20VC x SaaStr with MongoDB’s Dev Ittycheria: OpenAI Reaccelerates to a $70B Run Rate, a CRO Jumps to a Direct Competitor, and Agents Start Picking Your Vendors](https://www.saastr.com/20vc-x-saastr-with-mongodbs-dev-ittycheria-openai-reaccelerates-to-a-70b-run-rate-a-cro-jumps-to-a-direct-competitor-and-agents-start-picking-your-vendors)
[^2]: [Altman on OpenAI's IPO Plans, AI Agent Dots, AI Security](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-AXnqA7KBA)
[^3]: [𝕏 post by @nathanbenaich](https://x.com/nathanbenaich/status/2108096764289147151)
[^4]: [𝕏 post by @nathanbenaich](https://x.com/nathanbenaich/status/2108096756584239127)
[^5]: [𝕏 post by @nathanbenaich](https://x.com/nathanbenaich/status/2108096758844940294)
[^6]: [𝕏 post by @nathanbenaich](https://x.com/nathanbenaich/status/2108096761256640759)
[^7]: [𝕏 post by @a16z](https://x.com/a16z/status/2108213795642638837)
[^8]: [𝕏 post by @a16z](https://x.com/a16z/status/2108229800032878817)
[^9]: [𝕏 post by @a16z](https://x.com/a16z/status/2108308969815257427)
[^10]: [5 Interesting Learnings from Cloudflare at $2.8 Billion in Revenue: 36% Growth, a 20% Layoff, and a Stock at 50x Revenue](https://www.saastr.com/5-interesting-learnings-from-cloudflare-at-2-8-billion-in-revenue-36-growth-a-20-layoff-and-a-stock-at-50x-revenue)
[^11]: [r/MachineLearning post by u/tuhin_k](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/1x17shf/)
[^12]: [𝕏 article by @mignano](https://x.com/i/article/2108182027778269184)
[^13]: [𝕏 post by @hone](https://x.com/hone/status/2108218574926176490)
[^14]: [𝕏 post by @HarryStebbings](https://x.com/HarryStebbings/status/2108233962166632958)
[^15]: [𝕏 post by @kenanhsaleh](https://x.com/kenanhsaleh/status/2107880738058309727)
[^16]: [\[AINews\] Claude Haiku 5.5 — better than GPT-6 Luna at the same pricing](https://www.latent.space/p/ainews-claude-haiku-55-better-than)