Codex Reaches 7M Users, but Claude Code Leads on Revenue Per User

OpenAI's Codex coding agent surged from 600,000 to 7 million weekly active users between January and July 13, 2026, a roughly 730% increase in five months. Key growth drivers included a February desktop app launch, an April general-purpose agent update, and the July 9 GPT-5.6 release, which also merged Codex into the ChatGPT desktop app. Anthropic's Claude Code, by contrast, reported $2.5 billion in annualized recurring revenue as of February 2026, the fastest any developer tool has reached that milestone. Claude Code held 4.2 million weekly active users in Q1 2026 when Codex was still below 1 million, and is estimated to generate around $500 per user per year — significantly more than Codex. The comparison highlights a key distinction: Codex leads on raw user volume while Claude Code leads on revenue per user, making the two products difficult to rank by a single metric.
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