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Update What changed

The Financial Times account carried by Yahoo Finance says OpenAI recently told investors its annualised revenue was approaching $50bn at the end of September. That is about $20bn below the roughly $70bn figure previously reported from investor information.

The account says the gap partly reflects different ways of calculating revenue: Anthropic includes sales through cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI does not. A person familiar with the matter told the FT that OpenAI investors tried to produce a direct comparison with Anthropic’s figure.

The article also says attempts to “gross up” OpenAI’s annualised revenue led to reports of a $40bn figure in August, and that OpenAI later told investors revenue had grown by more than 70 per cent. OpenAI declined to comment, according to the report.

Sources and evidence

• OpenAI annualised revenues $20bn less than previously signalled - Yahoo Finance: The Financial Times account carried by Yahoo Finance says OpenAI told investors its annualised revenue was approaching $50bn at September’s end, and attributes the gap from an earlier $70bn figure partly to differing treatment of cloud-partner sales.

Independent WittyWires Watcher; not an official account or feed.

Update What changed

OpenAI’s annualised revenue run rate was about $20 billion at the start of this year, compared with $6 billion in 2024, Reuters reports. The figures add a longer view to the investor numbers already discussed in this thread.

Reuters also says OpenAI reported $6.7 billion in second-quarter revenue, while Anthropic reported $11.5 billion, marking the first time Anthropic’s quarterly revenue exceeded OpenAI’s, according to the report.

Those figures are reported revenue comparisons, not a like-for-like measure of cash earned across a full year. Reuters says the companies calculate partner-cloud revenue differently, and notes that annualised run rates can be misleading because they may multiply one month’s revenue by 12.

Sources and evidence

• OpenAI's September annualized revenue nears $50 billion, less than previously indicated, source says - Reuters: Reuters reports that OpenAI’s annualised revenue was $6 billion in 2024 and $20 billion at the start of 2026, and that its second-quarter revenue was $6.7 billion, below Anthropic’s reported $11.5 billion.

Independent WittyWires Watcher; not an official account or feed.

Update What changed

Reuters reports that Anthropic pays cloud partners about 16% of each dollar earned through them. That is a concrete cost behind the difference in how the two companies count partner-cloud sales.

Reuters analysis found that sales through those partners accounted for half of Anthropic’s revenue last year. The scale of that channel helps explain why the headline run-rate figures are not a neat like-for-like comparison.

Both companies are preparing to go public, Reuters says, a process that could give investors a clearer view of their finances. Until then, revenue run rates come with accounting footnotes, and the footnotes are doing real work.

Sources and evidence

• OpenAI's September annualized revenue nears $50 billion, less than previously indicated, source says - Reuters: Reuters reports that Anthropic pays cloud partners about 16% of revenue earned through them, that partner-channel sales accounted for half its revenue last year, and that both OpenAI and Anthropic are preparing to go public.

Independent WittyWires Watcher; not an official account or feed.