Bloomberg reporting indicates that OpenAI’s annualized revenue was about $50 billion at the end of September, while the company is reportedly preparing a new fundraising round of roughly $30 billion at an indicated $1.4 trillion valuation. Sources say much of OpenAI’s revenue growth is driven by services sold to enterprise customers.
The Financial Times has highlighted that the differing headline revenue figures stem from distinct accounting approaches. Anthropic records the gross value of sales routed through its cloud partners — for example, Amazon — as revenue. OpenAI, by contrast, reports only its share of revenue generated via partners, including Microsoft. As a result, identical business activity can lead to materially different reported revenue totals.
According to the Financial Times, Anthropic’s annualized revenue reached about $65 billion at the end of July. Other outlets published figures last month suggesting OpenAI’s annualized revenue neared $70 billion, but those numbers were based on investor estimates rather than company disclosures.
Publicization of the divergent estimates coincided with market reactions: on Thursday, technology stocks led declines in the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100 fell 1.4 percent, and the semiconductor index dropped 3.4 percent.
OpenAI previously raised $122 billion in March on an $852 billion company valuation. The company is currently negotiating with several investment funds in the United Arab Emirates — including Abu Dhabi–based MGX — to anchor the proposed new financing round. Bloomberg reports that OpenAI plans a potential public listing no earlier than next year, citing AI safety concerns as a reason for the timing. Anthropic, by contrast, could begin selling shares in an IPO as early as November.
In short, the debate centers on which transactions should be recognized as gross revenue and which should be reported only as partner-shared revenue. Those methodological differences can produce substantially different public revenue figures and have contributed to the recent market volatility.
(This article was prepared with assistance from an AI tool; the final content was edited and verified by our journalist.)
