OpenAI’s GPT-5 is gaining where it matters most: Enterprise

Sam Altman turned OpenAI into a cultural phenomenon with ChatGPT.

Now, three years later, he’s chasing where the real money is: Enterprise.

Last week’s rollout of GPT-5, OpenAI’s newest artificial intelligence model, was rocky. Critics bashed its less-intuitive feel, ultimately leading the company to restore its legacy GPT-4 to paying chatbot customers.

But GPT-5 isn’t about the consumer. It’s OpenAI’s effort to crack the enterprise market, where rival Anthropic has enjoyed a head start.

One week in, and startups like Cursor, Vercel, and Factory say they’ve already made GPT-5 the default model in certain key products and tools, touting its faster setup, better results on complex tasks, and a lower price.

Some companies said GPT-5 now matches or beats Claude on code and interface design, a space Anthropic once dominated.

Box, another enterprise customer, has been testing GPT-5 on long, logic-heavy documents. CEO Aaron Levie told CNBC the model is a “breakthrough,” saying it performs with a level of reasoning that prior systems couldn’t match.

Behind the scenes, OpenAI has built out its own enterprise sales team — more than 500 people under COO Brad Lightcap — operating independently of Microsoft, which has been the startup’s lead investor and key cloud partner. Customers can access GPT models through Microsoft Azure or go directly to OpenAI, which controls the API and product experience.

Still, the economics are brutal. The models are expensive to run, and both OpenAI and Anthropic are spending big to lock in customers, with OpenAI on track to burn $8 billion this year.

Cursor, still a major Anthropic customer, is now steering new users to OpenAI. The company’s co-founder and CEO Michael Truell underscored the change during OpenAI’s launch livestream, describing GPT-5 as “the smartest coding model we’ve ever tried.”

Truell said the change applies only to new sign-ups, as existing Cursor customers will continue using Anthropic as their default model. Cursor maintains a committed-revenue contract with Anthropic, which has built its business on dominating the enterprise layer.

As of June, enterprise makes up about 80% of its revenue, with annualized revenue growing 17x year-over-year, said a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity in order to discuss company data. The company added $3 billion in revenue in just the past six months — including $1 billion in June alone — and has already signed triple the number of eight- and nine-figure deals this year compared to all of 2024, the person said.

Anthropic said its enterprise footprint extends far beyond tech.

Claude powers tools for Amazon Prime,…