The "Digital Caliber Game" Behind the Trillion-Dollar Valuation: The Revenues of OpenAI and Anthropic Cannot Be Directly Compared

Author: Wall Street Watch

When the core financial metrics of the two giants in the AI industry cannot be compared apple to apple, investors are facing a fog of information.

OpenAI expects its annualized revenue to reach or exceed $70 billion by the end of the year, while Anthropic announced in July that its annualized revenue had reached $65 billion. However, according to a Bloomberg report on October 10, these two figures cannot be directly compared at all------the two companies use entirely different standards for the same metric.

Anthropic counts all sales generated through cloud partners like Amazon as revenue, while OpenAI only counts its net income share from partners like Microsoft. This means that OpenAI's numbers may appear significantly lower than Anthropic's on paper, but this does not represent its actual business scale lagging behind.

This discrepancy in standards has had a substantial impact on the market. Tech stocks fell this Thursday, partly because investors attempted to adjust OpenAI's numbers to a standard that could be directly compared to Anthropic's, resulting in a lower estimate and raising concerns about OpenAI's revenue growth.

Bloomberg previously reported that OpenAI's current annualized revenue is about $50 billion, lower than the $70 billion cited by some media, but the company expects to approach the latter by the end of the year. In the absence of standardized financial statements from both companies, annualized revenue has become a key metric for the market to judge whether the trillion-dollar AI boom can be realized------but it is also a seriously flawed indicator.

Discrepancy in Standards: The Same Metric, Two Algorithms

The root cause of the inability to directly compare the revenue figures of the two companies lies in the fundamental differences in revenue recognition methods.

Anthropic views cloud platforms like Amazon as distribution channels for its products, thus counting the total sales generated through these channels as revenue. OpenAI adopts a net method, only including the actual income share it receives from partners like Microsoft.

Reports indicate that investors have attempted to recalibrate the figures of both companies for comparability, but the conclusion reached was: the existing information is insufficient to support an accurate recalibration. Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at NYU Stern School of Business, stated that as long as each company remains consistent in its own standards, both net and gross revenue recognition are acceptable in principle, with the key being to provide maximum clarity for investors.

Limitations of ARR: A Non-standardized "Growth Story"

Annualized revenue (ARR) itself is a metric filled with elastic space and is easily distorted.

Annualized revenue, also known as annual revenue run rate, is calculated by extrapolating performance from a shorter period (such as a month or a quarter) to the entire year, or summing the contract values for the next 12 months. Reports indicate that companies have considerable discretion in determining this figure, and once future sales fail to materialize, the number can easily become distorted.

Damodaran likened this excessive focus on ARR to "looking at a kindergarten child's report card," bluntly stating: "By focusing on ARR itself, we have already strayed off track."

More notably, there is a significant gap between annualized revenue and the actual annual revenue recognized by the company.

Reports indicate that informed sources revealed that OpenAI currently expects its actual revenue for the entire year of 2026 to be about $35 billion, only half of its year-end annualized revenue forecast. Anthropic similarly has a comparable gap: documents seen by Bloomberg show that the company's actual revenue for 2025 is about $4.6 billion, while its publicly announced annualized revenue at that time had already exceeded $9 billion.

Market Impact: Black Box Effect Puts Pressure on Investors

In the absence of standardized financial disclosures, the revenue figures of the two companies have become a barometer for the entire AI investment narrative, and their uncertainty is transmitting to the broader market.

Mark Luschini, Chief Investment Strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott, stated: "When such an important market participant is somewhat of a black box, investing becomes very difficult." He pointed out that any uncertainty regarding the business prospects of OpenAI and Anthropic "adds another layer to the doubts that have already persisted and reverberated in the market."

Reports indicate that as tech stocks rise, pushing indices to maintain near historical highs, any signs of slowing sales growth from these two companies could impact the broader market and disrupt the expectations of companies like chip manufacturers that benefit from the AI investment wave.

OpenAI and Anthropic are not the only AI companies emphasizing annualized revenue. In the current wave, more and more star startups are using this metric to showcase growth and support their high valuations in the private market. Damodaran believes that the debate surrounding the technical details of annualized revenue is essentially avoiding a more fundamental question: how large of a real sales scale do these two companies need to create to cover their massive expenditures and support valuations exceeding $1 trillion?

The report also noted that with Anthropic about to land on Wall Street, this information asymmetry may soon see a turning point.

Once both companies complete their IPOs, investors will receive financial statements prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, at which point the reference value of the non-standardized annualized revenue metric will significantly decrease, and the market's judgment of the true financial status of both companies will be based on a much more solid foundation.