OpenAI and Anthropic's Revenue Reporting Discrepancies Spark Market Concerns: Annualized Revenue May Overstate Actual Income by Double

Beating AI News Flash: According to Bloomberg, there are significant differences in the revenue accounting methods of OpenAI and Anthropic, making the annualized revenues publicly disclosed by the two AI giants difficult to compare directly and intensifying investors' concerns about the growth prospects of the AI industry.

The report said that Anthropic includes the total sales generated through cloud service partners such as Amazon in its revenue, while OpenAI recognizes only the net revenue share it receives from partners such as Microsoft. Since neither company discloses standardized financial statements, investors currently find it difficult to accurately convert the actual business scale of the two.

Annualized revenue (ARR) also has limitations. People familiar with the matter revealed that OpenAI is expected to have actual full-year revenue of about $35 billion in 2026, about half of its year-end annualized revenue target of $70 billion. Documents seen by Bloomberg show that Anthropic's actual revenue in 2025 was about $4.6 billion, while the annualized revenue it disclosed at the time had already exceeded $9 billion.

Analysts pointed out that annualized revenue is usually extrapolated based on short-term performance or contract value and cannot be equated with actual recognized revenue for the full year. Against the backdrop of high valuations for AI giants and technology stocks at elevated levels, uncertainty in revenue growth and accounting methods may further affect the market's judgment of returns on AI investment.