OpenAI Tells Investors Annualized Revenue Is Near $50 Billion — About $20 Billion Short of the $70 Billion Signal

OpenAI's growth story just got a recalibration. According to the Financial Times, the company has told investors that its annualized revenue approached $50 billion as of the end of September — a striking number in absolute terms, but roughly $20 billion short of the roughly $70 billion run-rate that had been circulating in press reports over the past few weeks.

The earlier $70 billion signal wasn't invented out of thin air. In late September, The Financial Times and other outlets reported that OpenAI was closing in on $70 billion in annualized revenue, building on investor-side math: a reported August run-rate near $40 billion, compounded by the company's own disclosure that revenue had grown more than 70 percent. That arithmetic, it turns out, overstated where the company actually was.

According to people familiar with the matter, the discrepancy stems from investors trying to line up OpenAI's revenue directly against Anthropic's annualized run-rate — the comparison everyone in the market now makes. But the two companies use different accounting lenses: Anthropic books sales generated through cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud as its own revenue, while OpenAI does not apply the same treatment. Adjusted to a like-for-like basis, the two curves sit closer together than the raw numbers suggest.

OpenAI declined to comment on the figures. The company is widely reported to be preparing for an eventual public listing while chasing new revenue streams, including an advertising business inside ChatGPT, which raises the stakes on how its headline revenue number is read by the market.

Context matters here. Anthropic, OpenAI's closest rival in the enterprise, has said its annualized revenue has passed $30 billion ahead of a planned IPO — and a meaningful slice of that flows through Amazon and Google's clouds, according to its IPO filing. If investors were overlaying Anthropic's channel-inclusive methodology onto OpenAI's more conservative direct-revenue count, the resulting $70 billion narrative was always going to be fragile.

None of this changes the underlying trajectory: a company that was doing a few billion dollars a year in annualized revenue two years ago is now approaching fifty billion. But it does land awkwardly for a firm that has committed to hundreds of billions of dollars in compute purchases and data-center buildouts — commitments priced against revenue expectations that, at least on this accounting basis, are running about 29 percent cooler than the market was told.

Watch for two follow-ons: whether Anthropic's IPO prospectus forces a standardized disclosure of how cloud-channel revenue is attributed, and whether OpenAI starts publishing run-rate figures on its own terms before the listing process makes that choice for it.