OpenAI Revenue Reportedly $20B Below Earlier $70B Figure

OpenAI's revenue looks smaller than it did last week. The company has reportedly told investors that its annualized revenue is "approaching $50 billion." That figure is about $20 billion below the number that circulated only days earlier.

The Financial Times broke the news, and TechCrunch also reported it. The new figure changes how OpenAI compares with its closest rival, Anthropic. It also matters for one of the most heavily funded companies in tech.

From $70 billion to $50 billion

A little over a week ago, reports said OpenAI's annualized revenue was nearing $70 billion. At that level, OpenAI would have been roughly level with the run rate reported for Anthropic.

Annualized revenue, also called run rate, takes recent income and projects it over a full year. AI companies use it often because their sales can change quickly from month to month. It is not the same as audited annual revenue.

According to the FT, the $70 billion number did not come from nowhere. It was based on information OpenAI had already shared with investors. The FT says the higher figure came from "attempts by OpenAI's own investors to produce a direct comparison with Anthropic's annualised revenues."

So the earlier number was an adjusted estimate made by investors, not OpenAI's own headline figure. The company's own number is the lower one.

Two companies, two ways of counting

The gap comes down to method. OpenAI and Anthropic do not measure annualized revenue the same way.

• Anthropic includes sales made through its cloud partners in its figure.
• OpenAI does not include those sales.

This makes the two headline numbers hard to compare. Investors who wanted a like-for-like view appear to have rebuilt OpenAI's figure to match Anthropic's approach. The result looked much closer to Anthropic's total. On OpenAI's own terms, the number is about $50 billion.

TechCrunch said it had contacted OpenAI for comment.

Why the number matters so much

Revenue has been a sensitive subject for OpenAI for some time. The company needs to show that its income can support the very large sums being invested in it.

The amounts are large. OpenAI raised $122 billion in its March funding round alone. Financial figures for 2025 that leaked earlier this year showed revenue of about $13 billion, and spending that was significantly higher.

There is also the planned stock market listing. An OpenAI IPO had been rumored for this year. It has now been moved to early 2027. Before any listing, the company will have to present its numbers in a standard format that public investors can check, and that makes the question of how revenue is measured more important.

The competitive backdrop

The report arrives at a busy time in the race between the two labs. Anthropic is preparing for its own listing, and its IPO plans put its finances under similar scrutiny. When two private companies report revenue in different ways, outsiders struggle to judge who is ahead.

OpenAI has also been adding new ways to make money from its products, including visual display ads in ChatGPT. How much these new lines contribute is not covered in the report.

Reading Between the Numbers

The main lesson is about definitions, not decline. Based on the reporting, OpenAI's business did not lose $20 billion in a week. The gap comes from a different way of counting. Even so, the episode shows that "run rate" can mean different things from one company to the next, and readers should be careful with any headline figure that has no explanation of how it was calculated.

This fits a wider debate about whether AI spending is producing matching returns. Economists such as Daron Acemoglu have offered modest forecasts for AI's economic impact. OpenAI's reported gap between income and spending in 2025 adds to that discussion.

There are several things to watch. Will OpenAI publish its own method in more detail? Will the two labs move toward a shared standard before their listings? And will the lower figure affect investor appetite before the IPO planned for early 2027? Clear and comparable numbers are likely to matter more as both companies get closer to the public markets.