On Thursday, OpenAI’s reported annualized revenue dropped from $68 billion to $50 billion, and Nvidia, Oracle and CoreWeave dropped with it. Since the weekend there’s a better explanation, and it’s duller than the selloff: the two companies don’t count the same way.
The difference sits in the cloud partners
Anthropic counts the full value of sales that run through cloud partners — AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Foundry. OpenAI counts only its own share of those. The Financial Times reported on Thursday that OpenAI had told investors annualized revenue was approaching $50 billion at the end of September. The reason $68 to $70 billion had been circulating is that investors had been adjusting the figures to match Anthropic’s method.
Bloomberg put that under a headline on Friday that names the problem: Anthropic and OpenAI’s revenue calculations confuse investors.
Gross and net, says Wall Street
Jim Cramer says OpenAI “reports revenues differently from Anthropic” and that the number “isn’t apples to apples”. Daniel Newman, CEO of the Futurum Group, was blunter: “The whole OpenAI drama today was people not knowing the difference between gross and net revenue.”
Shay Boloor of Futurum Equities moves the question to what actually sticks: how much of every AI dollar does OpenAI keep after Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet take their cut? Microsoft alone gets 20% of total revenue through 2030, according to The Information.
Market platform Bull Theory counted $500 billion in US market value wiped out on Thursday. That’s an expensive way to learn a definition.
For Anthropic this isn’t a footnote
Anthropic is heading for the Nasdaq at a valuation people discuss in the trillions. Anyone defending a number like that would rather use the method that shows more revenue.
Nothing about it is wrong. Booking gross is legitimate when you’re the party on the customer’s contract. It just isn’t the number an investor is looking for.
Comparison starts with the prospectus
As long as both companies are private and define their own metrics, every direct comparison is an estimate with good press. For Anthropic that changes at the IPO: audited figures, in a format the SEC dictates.
It would be the first time anyone can check how much of an AI dollar actually stays at one of these two houses. Until then, the gap between $50 and $68 billion says nothing about demand — only something about bookkeeping.