A little-known American AI startup is looking to steal frontier AI companies’ bread and butter by letting enterprise customers build their own custom AI models.

OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s business models largely revolve around selling AI to business customers, via APIs and enterprise subscriptions. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar reportedly told investors in an August closed-door meeting that while the startup’s revenue had historically been approximately split 60/40 in favor of individual customers, that ratio had recently reversed: “The majority of our revenue is now enterprise,” Friar said, according to CNBC. In February, Anthropic said it had more than 500 business customers who spent more than $1 million annually on API usage or Claude subscriptions. A leaked IPO prospectus revealed last month that one-quarter of Anthropic’s revenue last year came from just two customers (both unnamed, but almost certainly businesses).

Several powerful open-source and open-weight models developed by Chinese AI labs have been a tempting alternative, since they can be modified to suit each customer’s needs and, more importantly, are cheaper than American frontier models. ChatGPT and Claude, in contrast, come with a confusing jumble of pricing plans that can be difficult to track. The era of so-called “token-maxxing,” when businesses encouraged employees to use AI tools as much as possible in their day-to-day work, has yielded to sober frugality . S. companies are understandably hesitant to hand over sensitive customer information to an AI developer with direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

Source link