Betting on a frontier AI lab? See who’s really ahead before you pick a side

Updated October 202670+ pagesPDF

Frontier AI Labs: Who’s Ahead
Cover of NewMarketPitch's Frontier AI Labs: Who’s Ahead report, 2026 edition
Who is really ahead in frontier AI, OpenAI or Anthropic? Anthropic, on 4 lines of 6. It sold $16.8B in its third quarter, about $67B a year against ~$50B for OpenAI, and has the top-rated model. OpenAI keeps the crowd, with 1 billion monthly users, and the bigger war chest. Chart from NewMarketPitch's Frontier AI Labs report.
Do frontier AI labs with more money make better models? Only up to a point. The two richest labs make the best models, but several Chinese labs come close with a small fraction of the money. Chart from NewMarketPitch's Frontier AI Labs report.
Who is fighting whom in frontier AI? OpenAI leads Google on users, Anthropic leads OpenAI on sales, and Alibaba leads DeepSeek on downloads. Alibaba and Kling split video, SSI and Thinking Machines split money and product. Chart from NewMarketPitch's Frontier AI Labs report.
How much money have frontier AI labs raised per employee? At Safe Superintelligence, about $160M per person, about four times OpenAI's level, for a team that could fit in one room. Most labs are between $10M and $40M. Chart from NewMarketPitch's Frontier AI Labs report.
Do chip and cloud giants fund the labs that buy from them? Yes. Amazon, Microsoft and Google put tens of billions into OpenAI and Anthropic, which in turn promised them far more in cloud spending, in deals worth up to hundreds of billions. Chart from NewMarketPitch's Frontier AI Labs report.
Which frontier AI labs raised a fortune with no product? Safe Superintelligence leads, with about $8B and still nothing customers can use. Several other labs raised hundreds of millions, some over $1B, with no product on the market yet. Chart from NewMarketPitch's Frontier AI Labs report.
What has Anthropic promised to spend on chips? Up to about four times what it raised. Its deals for chips, cloud and data centers are worth up to about $520B over several years, against $125B of funding. Chart from NewMarketPitch's Frontier AI Labs report.
Is Anthropic catching up with OpenAI in fundraising? Fast. Anthropic raised about $95B in 2026 alone and has now raised about two thirds of what OpenAI has, up from about half at the end of 2025. Chart from NewMarketPitch's Frontier AI Labs report.
Are Chinese AI models much cheaper than American ones? At the very top, yes: the best US models cost 10 to 40 times more than DeepSeek, GLM or MiniMax. Against everyday US models, the gap is much smaller. Chart from NewMarketPitch's Frontier AI Labs report.

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  • Who’s ahead, and who’s falling behind
  • How far the challengers are behind
  • Who leads on benchmarks, who only claims it
  • What technologies are gaining traction
  • Who are the top companies today
  • What are their valuations
  • Who’s getting funded, and by whom
  • Which business models are winning
  • What are the biggest unsolved problems
  • What has changed in the last 12 months
  • Where are the biggest opportunities
  • Who are the likely future winners
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Verified data with sourcesUpdated in October 2026