OpenAI’s revenue gap comes down to how sales are counted
OpenAI now tells investors it expects about $50bn this year, and the missing billions trace back to cloud sales Anthropic counts and OpenAI leaves out.
By
Daniel Okada
In brief
- OpenAI’s projection for this year rests on sales through the end of September.
- Anthropic books revenue from sales made via cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud; OpenAI does not.
- OpenAI is in early talks to raise $30bn at a valuation near $1.4tn.
- TechCrunch reports OpenAI’s IPO has slipped to early 2027.
OpenAI’s revenue for this year now looks set to land around $50bn (£37bn), well short of the $70bn figure that circulated widely a month earlier. The shortfall is less a sudden collapse in sales than a change in yardstick: the higher number came from an attempt to line OpenAI up against Anthropic, which measures its revenue more generously.
Where the missing $20bn went
According to The Guardian, the discrepancy grew out of efforts by OpenAI’s own investors to build a closer comparison with the way Anthropic reports projected revenue. The two rivals do not draw the line in the same place. Anthropic includes money earned when customers buy its models through cloud partners such as Amazon’s AWS and Google Cloud. OpenAI leaves those sales out of its figures.
Two metrics also sit side by side in the coverage and should not be confused. The Guardian describes the $50bn as a projection for this year’s total. TechCrunch, relaying the Financial Times, says OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue is “approaching $50 billion”. Only a little over a week before that report, the annualized figure was said to be nearing $70bn, a level that would have put OpenAI roughly on par with Anthropic’s reported run rate.
For scale, OpenAI’s leaked 2025 financials, cited by TechCrunch, showed revenue of about $13bn, with spending well above that amount.
How the two rivals stack up
| Measure | OpenAI | Anthropic |
|---|---|---|
| Latest headline revenue figure | About $50bn projected for this year | $65bn forecast revenue by end of July |
| Cloud partner sales counted | No | Yes |
| Most recent funding | $122bn round closed in March | $65bn raised two months later |
| Valuation at that round | $852bn | $965bn |
Read this way, the contest looks different from the one implied by the $70bn number. On their own reporting conventions, the two companies are not measuring the same thing, which is why investors tried to adjust OpenAI’s figure in the first place.
Why markets reacted
Annualized revenue forecasts from the leading AI developers are tracked by markets as a gauge of overall demand for a technology drawing enormous investment, The Guardian notes. That makes a headline gap of this size hard to ignore, even if the explanation is methodological. The paper says the news raises questions about how fast AI demand is really growing; it does not establish that demand is slowing.
Investor exposure is large. SoftBank has put $65bn into OpenAI, and the Financial Times reports that its founder, Masayoshi Son, is seeking up to $100bn from Gulf states for further AI bets.
What comes next for OpenAI and Anthropic
The revenue question lands in the middle of several pending moves. Readers following the rivalry with Anthropic will recognise how closely the two firms’ timelines now track each other:
- OpenAI is in early-stage talks to raise $30bn in a round valuing it at about $1.4tn.
- Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said last month the company would not list on the stock market this year as expected, citing AI safety concerns.
- TechCrunch reports the OpenAI IPO, once rumoured for this year, has been pushed to early 2027.
- Anthropic is expected to press ahead with its own IPO as soon as next month.
TechCrunch said it had contacted OpenAI for comment on the reported gap.
Photo: Rafael Minguet Delgado / Pexels
