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$2b/month which is $24b/year. Not as much as I expected considering they were at $20b by end of 2025.[0] They only added $4b since? Anthropic had $19b by end o

$2b/month which is $24b/year. Not as much as I expected considering they were at $20b by end of 2025.[0] They only added $4b since? Anthropic had $19b by end of February 2026 and they added $6b in February alone.[1] This means if they added another $6b in March, they're higher than OpenAI already. However, I heard that OpenAI and Anthropic report revenue in a different way. OpenAI takes 20% of revenue from Azure sales and reports revenue on that 20%. Anthropic reports all revenue, including AWS's share.[2] [0]https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-cfo-says-annualized-revenue-crosses-20-billion-2025-2026-01-19/ https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-cfo-says-annualized-... [1]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/anthropic-arr-surges-19-billion-151028403.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/anthropic-arr-surges-19-billi... [2]https://x.com/EthanChoi7/status/2036638459868385394 https://x.com/EthanChoi7/status/2036638459868385394

troupo 7mo ago
And that is revenue only. In the past 15 or so years most US companies (and especially startups) always talk about revenue only. Wheras only profit should matter. E.g. what good is 20 billion per year when "OpenAI is targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spending through 2030". That is $150 billion per year?
- merlindru 7mo ago
  why should only profits matter? if i had a killer product today that i just need to sell tomorrow, wouldn't you still invest today knowing i'll probably only start to make money tomorrow (or perhaps next week)? the expectation is that they'll eventually make money. they can't raise forever. only startups are not profitable for a few years. but most companies that have existed for a long while have been profitable and since they're expected to make a LOT of money, everyone wants a piece of that future pie, pushing up the valuation and amount raised to admittedly somewhat delusional levels like here
  - Barrin92 7mo ago
    not if your product is selling two dollars for one dollar and as soon as you'll start to charge more I'll switch to one of your twenty competitors profit isn't a function of having a killer product, it's a function of having no competition
    - ds2df 7mo ago
      no competition is a bit extreme. Limited competition yes due to competitive advantages.
    - aurareturn 7mo ago
      And why do you think twenty competitors can stay competitive for years to come? Industries always consolidate and winners emerge. SOTA LLMs look like a natural monopoly or duopoly to me because the cost to train the next model keeps going up such that it won't make sense for 20 competitors to compete at the very high end. TSMC is a perfect example of this. Fab costs double every 4 years (Rock’s Law). It's almost impossible to compete against TSMC because no one has the customer base to generate enough revenue to build the next generation of fabs - except those who are propped up by governments such as Intel and Rapidus. Samsung is basically the SK government. I don’t see how companies can catch OpenAI or Anthropic without the strong revenue growth.
      - outside1234 7mo ago
        Google has completely caught OpenAI. Anthropic has a better coding model, but I'm sure Google is working on that too.
        baq 7mo ago
        > Anthropic has a better coding model I’ll be polite and call this statement ‘a very debatable’ one.
      - Barrin92 7mo ago
        >Industries always consolidate and winners emerge. no, most industries just sell boring generic products, a few industries favor monopolists. Semiconductors are one of them but LLMs are also as far removed from that business as is physically possible. TSMC makes the most complicated machines humans have ever built, a LLM requires a few dozen nerds, a power plant, a few thousand lines of python and chips. That's why if you're Elon Musk you could buy all of the above and train yourself an LLM in a month. LLMs are comically simple pieces of software, they're just big. But anyone with a billion dollars can have one, they're all going to be commoditized and free in due time, like search. Copying a lithography machine is difficult, copying software is easy. that's why Google burrowed itself into email, and browsers, and your phone's OS. Problem for openai is they don't have any of that, there's already half a dozen companies that, for 99% of people, do what they do.
  - bandrami 7mo ago
    > why should only profits matter? In this case because it's not clear that anybody has actually figured out how to sell inference for more than it costs
    - nl 7mo ago
      It's well know everyone is making great money on inference. The cost is training. Whether GPT-5 was profitable to run depends on which profit margin you’re talking about. If we subtract the cost of compute from revenue to calculate the gross margin (on an accounting basis),2 it seems to be about 30% — lower than the norm for software companies (where 60-80% is typical) but still higher than many industries. (They go on to point out that there are other costs that might mean they didn't break even on other costs - although I suspect these costs should be partially amortized over the whole GPT 5.x series, not just 5.0) https://epochai.substack.com/p/can-ai-companies-become-profitable https://epochai.substack.com/p/can-ai-companies-become-profi... https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-really-losing-money-on-inference/ https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re... (with math working backwards from GPU capacity) "Most of what we're building out at this point is the inference [...] We're profitable on inference. If we didn't pay for training, we'd be a very profitable company" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/17/sam-altman/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/17/sam-altman/ "There’s a bright spot, however. OpenAI has gotten more efficient at serving paying users: Its compute margin—the revenue left after subtracting the cost of running AI models for those customers—was roughly 70% in October, an increase from about 52% at the end of last year and roughly 35% in January 2024." https://archive.is/OqIny#selection-1279.0-1279.305 https://archive.is/OqIny#selection-1279.0-1279.305 (Note this is after having to pay higher spot rates for compute because of higher than expected demand)
      - bandrami 7mo ago
        > It's well know everyone is making great money on inference. That is not, in fact, "well known", but based entirely on the announcements of the inference providers themselves who also get very cagey when asked to show their work and at least look like they're soliciting a constant firehose of investment money simply to keep the lights on. In particular there's a troubling tendency to call revenue "recurring" before it actually, you know, recurs.
- Swizec 7mo ago
  > Wheras only profit should matter Profit is money you couldn’t figure out how to spend. During growth, you want positive operating margins with nominal profits. When the company/market matures, you want pure profits because shareholders like money. If you can find a way to invest those profits in new areas of growth, that’s better.
  - aurareturn 7mo ago
    Not sure why you’re downvoted. Everyone wants to treat OpenAI like a car wash business where they need to make a profit almost immediately. I don’t know why people can’t understand that the industry is in a rapid growth stage and investing the money is more important than making a profit now. The profits will come later.
    - troupo 7mo ago
      "Profits will come later" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47597480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47597480
    - nutjob2 7mo ago
      > The profits will come later. The nearly $1T hand wave. Forgive me if I ask how. Might give it some credence if Anthropic and Google weren't pulling even with or surpassing them in various way or markets. Whats worse is they mostly seem to have retail market name recognition which is arguably the hardest, or maybe the impossible market to make money from.
      - aurareturn 7mo ago
        Whats worse is they mostly seem to have retail market name recognition which is arguably the hardest, or maybe the impossible market to make money from. That doesn't seem to be the case at all. Meta and Google are two of the most profitable companies in history, off the backs of free users. Apple is another one that focuses almost exclusively on retail and is also one of the most profitable in history.
    - 7mo ago
- aurareturn 7mo ago
  It's not as much as you think. Google is spending $185b on data centers this year alone. Amazon is spending $200b this year. Total capex for big tech is ~$700b in 2026 and we're not including neo clouds, Chinese clouds, and other sovereign data centers. Since everyone is trying to get compute from anywhere they can, including OpenAI going to Google, it's hard to tell what is used internally vs externally. For example, it's entirely possible that Google's internal roadmap for Gemini sees it using $600b of compute through 2030 as well. In that case, OpenAI needs to match since compute is revenue.
  - hvb2 7mo ago
    But if Gemini doesn't end up using the compute because of whatever reason, Google has other ways to monetize that compute. OpenAI doesn't? So the same money spent by OpenAI and Google doesn't carry nearly the same amount of risk?
    - aurareturn 7mo ago
      OpenAI doesn't? Why not? They've openly said they could in theory sell compute to others if they can't use it all.
      - adgjlsfhk1 7mo ago
        this isn't credible though. them not being able to use all their compute likely means that the ai bubble has popped, so they won't be getting a good price on it.
      - hvb2 7mo ago
        And who would be buying this from them? Let's say you're anthropic, would you give money to your competitor? I'll also add that Google is already a player in that space so more likely to easily sell it off.
- pier25 7mo ago
  Give me a billion and I'll have 500M of revenue in no time by selling dollars at 50 cents.
  - aurareturn 7mo ago
    Why are we treating OpenAI and Anthropic differently than say, Amazon or Uber? Both companies invested in growth for many years before making a profit. Most tech companies in the last 2-3 decades lost money for years before making a profit. Why are we saying that OpenAI and Anthropic can't do the same?
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - hirako2000 7mo ago
      Two reasons. They somewhat broke even, and kept getting investment. The potential for quasi monopoly was obvious. Openai can't claim either.
      - aurareturn 7mo ago
        How did Uber somewhat break even? They lost $34b before making a profit. Uber was only on a path to monopoly in the US, not world wide. It’s lost to local competitors in most countries. And it can get disrupted by self driving cars soon. OpenAI’s SOTA LLM training smells like a natural monopoly or duopoly to me. The cost to train the smartest models keep increasing. Most competitors will bow out as they do not have the revenue to keep competing. You can already see this with a few labs looking for a niche instead of competing head on with Anthropic and OpenAI.
        vlovich123 7mo ago
        The cost of copying SOTA models though is super cheap and doesn’t take super long.
        7mo ago
- muzani 7mo ago
  The startup game is about building assets and then cashing out on them during exit. Assets are harder to measure. Facebook used to say something silly like every user was worth $100. That sounded ridiculous for a completely free app but over a decade later, the company is worth more than that. Revenue is an easier way of measuring assets than profit. Profit doesn't really matter. It gets taxed. But it's not about dodging taxes; it's because sitting on a pile of money is inefficient. They can hire people. They can buy hardware. They can give discounts to users with high CLTV. They can acquire instead of building. It's healthy to have profit close to $0, if not slightly negative. If revenues fall or costs increase, they can make up for the difference by just firing people or cutting unprofitable projects. Also when they're raising money, it makes absolutely no sense to be profitable. If they were profitable, why would they raise money? Just use the profits.
- nl 7mo ago
  What is the point - exactly - of profit? Profit is money you can't find a use for to grow your business, so you give some of it to the government in the form of tax. Also there is a big difference between operational expenses and capital expenses like building data centers. I think OpenAI is being very aggressive on the growth vs conservative financial management spectrum but just saying "only profit should matter" is just wrong.
  - bandrami 7mo ago
    > What is the point - exactly - of profit? It's what attracts capital investment, which businesses need
    - nl 7mo ago
      OpenAI seems to do reasonably well at attracting capital investment without profits. As did Amazon, Google, Meta etc etc.
      - bandrami 7mo ago
        OpenAI is great at attracting people who say "yeah, sure, I'll give you capital at some point in the future" who then never actually give them the capital (or at least haven't yet).
        deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
        nl 7mo ago
        They seem to be spending lot of cash too...
      - ngold 7mo ago
        If I remember correctly, Facebook took 10 years raising money before going ipo. Could be wrong though.
  - troupo 7mo ago
maerF0x0 7mo ago
30x revenues at 17% revenue growth is... aggressive.
- jsnell 7mo ago
  Except it's not 100x revenues, and it's not 17% growth. I don't know where you got those numbers from? The numbers OpenAI gave in the post would mean a 30x multiple pre-money. And the $20B -> $24B run-rate growth since the start of the year could plausibly mean anything from 110% to 200% annualized growth rate, depending on whether that happened over two or three months. The $24B is a lower bound as well, since they only gave use one significant digit for the monthly revenue.
  - maerF0x0 7mo ago
    You're right, I was thinking about 100x revenues and forgot to confirm the math. Updated to reflect your point. ChatGPT itself provided the 17% number (it's most recently available growth rate)...
- YetAnotherNick 7mo ago
  > 17% revenue growth I think ads is going to massively change this number.
manquer 7mo ago
They aren't reporting anything yet. What we hearing is just from news media who get their leaks/info from investors who get some form of IR reports/ presentation. Both will do public reporting only when they IPO[4] and have regulatory requirement to do so every quarter. For private companies[1] reporting to investors there are no fixed rules really[3] Even for public companies, there is fair amount of leeway on how GAAP[2]expects recognize revenue. The two ways you highlight is how you account for GMV- Gross Merchandise Value. The operating margin becomes very less so multiples on absolute revenue gets impacted when you consider GMV as revenue. For example if you consider GMV in revenue then AMZN only trades at ~3x ($2.25T/$~800B )to say MSFT($2.75T/$300B) and GOOG ($3.4T/$400B) who both trade at 9x their revenue. While roughly similar in maturity, size, growth potential and even large overlap of directly competing businesses, there is huge (3x / 9x) difference because AMZN's number includes with GMV in retail that GOOG and MSFT do not have in same size in theirs. --- [1] There are still a lot of rules reporting to IRS and other government entities, but that information we (and news media) get is from investors not leaks from government reporting - which would be typically be private and illegal to disclose to public. [2] And the Big 4 who sign off on the audit for companies prefer to account for it. [3] As long as it is not explicit fraud or cooking the books, i.e. they are transparent about their methods. [4] Strictly this would be covered in the prospectus(S-1) few weeks before going public and that is first real look we get into the details.
- aurareturn 7mo ago
  They aren't reporting anything yet. What we hearing is just from news media who get their leaks/info from investors who get some form of IR reports/ presentation. The $24b figure is literally in OpenAI's announcement. The $19b ARR and $6b added in Feb came directly from Anthropic CEO recently.
  - bandrami 7mo ago
    Announcing isn't reporting. Am I the only one old enough to remember Enron?
  - manquer 7mo ago
    I am reminded of the "I declare bankruptcy" meme from the 2000's TV series Office. When we say reporting it means there are statutory submissions with an auditor signing off, with legal liability. As the other reply referenced consequences for doing this incorrectly can be severe - Arthur Anderson is no more after all because of Enron. A Press Release (of a private entity) does not have to satisfy this high bar. Press release does mean no constraints, for public companies, disclosure of important information by officers and other insiders have strong controls. Even if its the just a rocket/poop emoji on a casual social media platform. Lawyers have to refile with the SEC in the expected format. Even private companies have restrictions on not claiming things fraudulently to investors, but these are accredited investors with lesser controls than retail.
dmix 7mo ago
Still a huge amount of revenue for any company. Those $20/month fees are going to triple in a couple yrs. But the VCs expect much much more.
- willio58 7mo ago
  Friends of mine working in AI companies are saying we’ll be lucky if they only triple. More like 10-20x long term, especially for enterprise
  - mrweasel 7mo ago
    Oh, I read it as the number of subscribers would triple, but you're suggesting the price will? That makes a little more sense, because the number of subscribers are so low that tripling won't really make much difference in terms of turning a profit.
    - Bombthecat 7mo ago
      It's for companies to replace people. Works out ok for them. Even four times isn't that much
      - ef3dfd 7mo ago
        Its simply not going to happen. People like Nadella call it 'tacit knowledge' - the reality is the work people do is much broader than what is producible by LLMs alone. Without the human, there is no work done. Unlike classic machinery, LLMs are not comparable in that you cant simply reduce labour input by X and be fine. Sure in the short term the consequences will not show up, but in the long term they will. Altman and co. get down on their knees and pray that proposition is only transitory in the short run. LLMs wont disappear, but they wont be large profit generators either. Especially not so whilst there is fierce competition and every dollar of profit is re-invested. The value of an asset is derived upon its potential cash return, net of reinvestment, taxes et al. Altman is hoping to survive long enough to finance R&D to figure out how to encode the entirety of what humans do, to be able to come good on the asinine aspirations he has put forth that justify its valuation. But it will end in disaster.
natas 7mo ago
OpenAI is a few years behind Anthropic, and it's unlikely they'll catch up at this point.
- mrklol 7mo ago
  Where exactly are they behind?
  - PunchTornado 7mo ago
    everywhere, but most important in ethics
    - serf 7mo ago
      your ethics. let's not forget that these major LLMs are all the children of corporate hyper-piracy en masse, none of them are ethical even in origin unless you're talking about the pre-product company charter kind of ethics, like google .
      - PunchTornado 7mo ago
        You can't put anthropic and openai in the same basket regarding ethics. One accepted Department of War's conditions and the other not.
        Teelo 7mo ago
        How is anthropic training their models? Surely they're not using other people's work without their permission, right?
        boppo1 7mo ago
        Last I heard, claude was the model powering maven when it bombed that school. Most aren't up-to date on that because anthropic launders their culpability through palanntir. Anthropic is better at optics not ethics.
interludead 7mo ago
I'd be pretty cautious comparing those numbers directly
robertozoia 7mo ago
$20b is December 2025 revenue multiplied by 12. Actual 2025 annual booked revenue is more in the order of $13b[0]. Also, those $122b raised are not cash-in-hand. For example, NVIDIA commits to $30b, but OpenAI must build 5gw inference+training capacity using NVIDIA's Ruby Vera systems. NVIDIA's Huang has said[1] that in 1gw of compute, around $35b are NVIDIA hardware. So that $30b investment from NVIDIA goes back to NVIDIA as $175b in revenue. (Besides, NVIDIA gets non-voting shares in OpenAI.) Deals like these are one of the few ways OpenAI can sustain growing in capacity, but it comes at a huge premium. That's one of the reasons they need the IPO, to get access to cheaper money. [0]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-is-the-2025-yahoo-finance-company-of-the-year-120054312.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-is-the-2025-yahoo-fina... [1]https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/22/nvidia-openai-data-center.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/22/nvidia-openai-data-center.ht...

troupo 7mo ago

And that is revenue only. In the past 15 or so years most US companies (and especially startups) always talk about revenue only. Wheras only profit should matter. E.g. what good is 20 billion per year when "OpenAI is targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spending through 2030". That is $150 billion per year?

merlindru 7mo ago
why should only profits matter? if i had a killer product today that i just need to sell tomorrow, wouldn't you still invest today knowing i'll probably only start to make money tomorrow (or perhaps next week)? the expectation is that they'll eventually make money. they can't raise forever. only startups are not profitable for a few years. but most companies that have existed for a long while have been profitable and since they're expected to make a LOT of money, everyone wants a piece of that future pie, pushing up the valuation and amount raised to admittedly somewhat delusional levels like here
- Barrin92 7mo ago
  not if your product is selling two dollars for one dollar and as soon as you'll start to charge more I'll switch to one of your twenty competitors profit isn't a function of having a killer product, it's a function of having no competition
  - ds2df 7mo ago
    no competition is a bit extreme. Limited competition yes due to competitive advantages.
  - aurareturn 7mo ago
    And why do you think twenty competitors can stay competitive for years to come? Industries always consolidate and winners emerge. SOTA LLMs look like a natural monopoly or duopoly to me because the cost to train the next model keeps going up such that it won't make sense for 20 competitors to compete at the very high end. TSMC is a perfect example of this. Fab costs double every 4 years (Rock’s Law). It's almost impossible to compete against TSMC because no one has the customer base to generate enough revenue to build the next generation of fabs - except those who are propped up by governments such as Intel and Rapidus. Samsung is basically the SK government. I don’t see how companies can catch OpenAI or Anthropic without the strong revenue growth.
    - outside1234 7mo ago
      Google has completely caught OpenAI. Anthropic has a better coding model, but I'm sure Google is working on that too.
      - baq 7mo ago
        > Anthropic has a better coding model I’ll be polite and call this statement ‘a very debatable’ one.
    - Barrin92 7mo ago
      >Industries always consolidate and winners emerge. no, most industries just sell boring generic products, a few industries favor monopolists. Semiconductors are one of them but LLMs are also as far removed from that business as is physically possible. TSMC makes the most complicated machines humans have ever built, a LLM requires a few dozen nerds, a power plant, a few thousand lines of python and chips. That's why if you're Elon Musk you could buy all of the above and train yourself an LLM in a month. LLMs are comically simple pieces of software, they're just big. But anyone with a billion dollars can have one, they're all going to be commoditized and free in due time, like search. Copying a lithography machine is difficult, copying software is easy. that's why Google burrowed itself into email, and browsers, and your phone's OS. Problem for openai is they don't have any of that, there's already half a dozen companies that, for 99% of people, do what they do.
- bandrami 7mo ago
  > why should only profits matter? In this case because it's not clear that anybody has actually figured out how to sell inference for more than it costs
  - nl 7mo ago
    It's well know everyone is making great money on inference. The cost is training. Whether GPT-5 was profitable to run depends on which profit margin you’re talking about. If we subtract the cost of compute from revenue to calculate the gross margin (on an accounting basis),2 it seems to be about 30% — lower than the norm for software companies (where 60-80% is typical) but still higher than many industries. (They go on to point out that there are other costs that might mean they didn't break even on other costs - although I suspect these costs should be partially amortized over the whole GPT 5.x series, not just 5.0) https://epochai.substack.com/p/can-ai-companies-become-profitable https://epochai.substack.com/p/can-ai-companies-become-profi... https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-really-losing-money-on-inference/ https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re... (with math working backwards from GPU capacity) "Most of what we're building out at this point is the inference [...] We're profitable on inference. If we didn't pay for training, we'd be a very profitable company" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/17/sam-altman/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/17/sam-altman/ "There’s a bright spot, however. OpenAI has gotten more efficient at serving paying users: Its compute margin—the revenue left after subtracting the cost of running AI models for those customers—was roughly 70% in October, an increase from about 52% at the end of last year and roughly 35% in January 2024." https://archive.is/OqIny#selection-1279.0-1279.305 https://archive.is/OqIny#selection-1279.0-1279.305 (Note this is after having to pay higher spot rates for compute because of higher than expected demand)
    - bandrami 7mo ago
      > It's well know everyone is making great money on inference. That is not, in fact, "well known", but based entirely on the announcements of the inference providers themselves who also get very cagey when asked to show their work and at least look like they're soliciting a constant firehose of investment money simply to keep the lights on. In particular there's a troubling tendency to call revenue "recurring" before it actually, you know, recurs.
Swizec 7mo ago
> Wheras only profit should matter Profit is money you couldn’t figure out how to spend. During growth, you want positive operating margins with nominal profits. When the company/market matures, you want pure profits because shareholders like money. If you can find a way to invest those profits in new areas of growth, that’s better.
- aurareturn 7mo ago
  Not sure why you’re downvoted. Everyone wants to treat OpenAI like a car wash business where they need to make a profit almost immediately. I don’t know why people can’t understand that the industry is in a rapid growth stage and investing the money is more important than making a profit now. The profits will come later.
  - troupo 7mo ago
    "Profits will come later" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47597480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47597480
  - nutjob2 7mo ago
    > The profits will come later. The nearly $1T hand wave. Forgive me if I ask how. Might give it some credence if Anthropic and Google weren't pulling even with or surpassing them in various way or markets. Whats worse is they mostly seem to have retail market name recognition which is arguably the hardest, or maybe the impossible market to make money from.
    - aurareturn 7mo ago
      Whats worse is they mostly seem to have retail market name recognition which is arguably the hardest, or maybe the impossible market to make money from. That doesn't seem to be the case at all. Meta and Google are two of the most profitable companies in history, off the backs of free users. Apple is another one that focuses almost exclusively on retail and is also one of the most profitable in history.
  - 7mo ago
aurareturn 7mo ago
It's not as much as you think. Google is spending $185b on data centers this year alone. Amazon is spending $200b this year. Total capex for big tech is ~$700b in 2026 and we're not including neo clouds, Chinese clouds, and other sovereign data centers. Since everyone is trying to get compute from anywhere they can, including OpenAI going to Google, it's hard to tell what is used internally vs externally. For example, it's entirely possible that Google's internal roadmap for Gemini sees it using $600b of compute through 2030 as well. In that case, OpenAI needs to match since compute is revenue.
- hvb2 7mo ago
  But if Gemini doesn't end up using the compute because of whatever reason, Google has other ways to monetize that compute. OpenAI doesn't? So the same money spent by OpenAI and Google doesn't carry nearly the same amount of risk?
  - aurareturn 7mo ago
    OpenAI doesn't? Why not? They've openly said they could in theory sell compute to others if they can't use it all.
    - adgjlsfhk1 7mo ago
      this isn't credible though. them not being able to use all their compute likely means that the ai bubble has popped, so they won't be getting a good price on it.
    - hvb2 7mo ago
      And who would be buying this from them? Let's say you're anthropic, would you give money to your competitor? I'll also add that Google is already a player in that space so more likely to easily sell it off.
pier25 7mo ago
Give me a billion and I'll have 500M of revenue in no time by selling dollars at 50 cents.
- aurareturn 7mo ago
  Why are we treating OpenAI and Anthropic differently than say, Amazon or Uber? Both companies invested in growth for many years before making a profit. Most tech companies in the last 2-3 decades lost money for years before making a profit. Why are we saying that OpenAI and Anthropic can't do the same?
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - hirako2000 7mo ago
    Two reasons. They somewhat broke even, and kept getting investment. The potential for quasi monopoly was obvious. Openai can't claim either.
    - aurareturn 7mo ago
      How did Uber somewhat break even? They lost $34b before making a profit. Uber was only on a path to monopoly in the US, not world wide. It’s lost to local competitors in most countries. And it can get disrupted by self driving cars soon. OpenAI’s SOTA LLM training smells like a natural monopoly or duopoly to me. The cost to train the smartest models keep increasing. Most competitors will bow out as they do not have the revenue to keep competing. You can already see this with a few labs looking for a niche instead of competing head on with Anthropic and OpenAI.
      - vlovich123 7mo ago
        The cost of copying SOTA models though is super cheap and doesn’t take super long.
        7mo ago
muzani 7mo ago
The startup game is about building assets and then cashing out on them during exit. Assets are harder to measure. Facebook used to say something silly like every user was worth $100. That sounded ridiculous for a completely free app but over a decade later, the company is worth more than that. Revenue is an easier way of measuring assets than profit. Profit doesn't really matter. It gets taxed. But it's not about dodging taxes; it's because sitting on a pile of money is inefficient. They can hire people. They can buy hardware. They can give discounts to users with high CLTV. They can acquire instead of building. It's healthy to have profit close to $0, if not slightly negative. If revenues fall or costs increase, they can make up for the difference by just firing people or cutting unprofitable projects. Also when they're raising money, it makes absolutely no sense to be profitable. If they were profitable, why would they raise money? Just use the profits.
nl 7mo ago
What is the point - exactly - of profit? Profit is money you can't find a use for to grow your business, so you give some of it to the government in the form of tax. Also there is a big difference between operational expenses and capital expenses like building data centers. I think OpenAI is being very aggressive on the growth vs conservative financial management spectrum but just saying "only profit should matter" is just wrong.
- bandrami 7mo ago
  > What is the point - exactly - of profit? It's what attracts capital investment, which businesses need
  - nl 7mo ago
    OpenAI seems to do reasonably well at attracting capital investment without profits. As did Amazon, Google, Meta etc etc.
    - bandrami 7mo ago
      OpenAI is great at attracting people who say "yeah, sure, I'll give you capital at some point in the future" who then never actually give them the capital (or at least haven't yet).
      - deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      - nl 7mo ago
        They seem to be spending lot of cash too...
    - ngold 7mo ago
      If I remember correctly, Facebook took 10 years raising money before going ipo. Could be wrong though.
- troupo 7mo ago

maerF0x0 7mo ago

30x revenues at 17% revenue growth is... aggressive.

jsnell 7mo ago
Except it's not 100x revenues, and it's not 17% growth. I don't know where you got those numbers from? The numbers OpenAI gave in the post would mean a 30x multiple pre-money. And the $20B -> $24B run-rate growth since the start of the year could plausibly mean anything from 110% to 200% annualized growth rate, depending on whether that happened over two or three months. The $24B is a lower bound as well, since they only gave use one significant digit for the monthly revenue.
- maerF0x0 7mo ago
  You're right, I was thinking about 100x revenues and forgot to confirm the math. Updated to reflect your point. ChatGPT itself provided the 17% number (it's most recently available growth rate)...
YetAnotherNick 7mo ago
> 17% revenue growth I think ads is going to massively change this number.

manquer 7mo ago

They aren't reporting anything yet. What we hearing is just from news media who get their leaks/info from investors who get some form of IR reports/ presentation. Both will do public reporting only when they IPO[4] and have regulatory requirement to do so every quarter. For private companies[1] reporting to investors there are no fixed rules really[3] Even for public companies, there is fair amount of leeway on how GAAP[2]expects recognize revenue. The two ways you highlight is how you account for GMV- Gross Merchandise Value. The operating margin becomes very less so multiples on absolute revenue gets impacted when you consider GMV as revenue. For example if you consider GMV in revenue then AMZN only trades at ~3x ($2.25T/$~800B )to say MSFT($2.75T/$300B) and GOOG ($3.4T/$400B) who both trade at 9x their revenue. While roughly similar in maturity, size, growth potential and even large overlap of directly competing businesses, there is huge (3x / 9x) difference because AMZN's number includes with GMV in retail that GOOG and MSFT do not have in same size in theirs. --- [1] There are still a lot of rules reporting to IRS and other government entities, but that information we (and news media) get is from investors not leaks from government reporting - which would be typically be private and illegal to disclose to public. [2] And the Big 4 who sign off on the audit for companies prefer to account for it. [3] As long as it is not explicit fraud or cooking the books, i.e. they are transparent about their methods. [4] Strictly this would be covered in the prospectus(S-1) few weeks before going public and that is first real look we get into the details.

aurareturn 7mo ago
They aren't reporting anything yet. What we hearing is just from news media who get their leaks/info from investors who get some form of IR reports/ presentation. The $24b figure is literally in OpenAI's announcement. The $19b ARR and $6b added in Feb came directly from Anthropic CEO recently.
- bandrami 7mo ago
  Announcing isn't reporting. Am I the only one old enough to remember Enron?
- manquer 7mo ago
  I am reminded of the "I declare bankruptcy" meme from the 2000's TV series Office. When we say reporting it means there are statutory submissions with an auditor signing off, with legal liability. As the other reply referenced consequences for doing this incorrectly can be severe - Arthur Anderson is no more after all because of Enron. A Press Release (of a private entity) does not have to satisfy this high bar. Press release does mean no constraints, for public companies, disclosure of important information by officers and other insiders have strong controls. Even if its the just a rocket/poop emoji on a casual social media platform. Lawyers have to refile with the SEC in the expected format. Even private companies have restrictions on not claiming things fraudulently to investors, but these are accredited investors with lesser controls than retail.

dmix 7mo ago

Still a huge amount of revenue for any company. Those $20/month fees are going to triple in a couple yrs. But the VCs expect much much more.

willio58 7mo ago
Friends of mine working in AI companies are saying we’ll be lucky if they only triple. More like 10-20x long term, especially for enterprise
- mrweasel 7mo ago
  Oh, I read it as the number of subscribers would triple, but you're suggesting the price will? That makes a little more sense, because the number of subscribers are so low that tripling won't really make much difference in terms of turning a profit.
  - Bombthecat 7mo ago
    It's for companies to replace people. Works out ok for them. Even four times isn't that much
    - ef3dfd 7mo ago
      Its simply not going to happen. People like Nadella call it 'tacit knowledge' - the reality is the work people do is much broader than what is producible by LLMs alone. Without the human, there is no work done. Unlike classic machinery, LLMs are not comparable in that you cant simply reduce labour input by X and be fine. Sure in the short term the consequences will not show up, but in the long term they will. Altman and co. get down on their knees and pray that proposition is only transitory in the short run. LLMs wont disappear, but they wont be large profit generators either. Especially not so whilst there is fierce competition and every dollar of profit is re-invested. The value of an asset is derived upon its potential cash return, net of reinvestment, taxes et al. Altman is hoping to survive long enough to finance R&D to figure out how to encode the entirety of what humans do, to be able to come good on the asinine aspirations he has put forth that justify its valuation. But it will end in disaster.

natas 7mo ago

OpenAI is a few years behind Anthropic, and it's unlikely they'll catch up at this point.

mrklol 7mo ago
Where exactly are they behind?
- PunchTornado 7mo ago
  everywhere, but most important in ethics
  - serf 7mo ago
    your ethics. let's not forget that these major LLMs are all the children of corporate hyper-piracy en masse, none of them are ethical even in origin unless you're talking about the pre-product company charter kind of ethics, like google .
    - PunchTornado 7mo ago
      You can't put anthropic and openai in the same basket regarding ethics. One accepted Department of War's conditions and the other not.
      - Teelo 7mo ago
        How is anthropic training their models? Surely they're not using other people's work without their permission, right?
      - boppo1 7mo ago
        Last I heard, claude was the model powering maven when it bombed that school. Most aren't up-to date on that because anthropic launders their culpability through palanntir. Anthropic is better at optics not ethics.

interludead 7mo ago

I'd be pretty cautious comparing those numbers directly

robertozoia 7mo ago

$20b is December 2025 revenue multiplied by 12. Actual 2025 annual booked revenue is more in the order of $13b[0]. Also, those $122b raised are not cash-in-hand. For example, NVIDIA commits to $30b, but OpenAI must build 5gw inference+training capacity using NVIDIA's Ruby Vera systems. NVIDIA's Huang has said[1] that in 1gw of compute, around $35b are NVIDIA hardware. So that $30b investment from NVIDIA goes back to NVIDIA as $175b in revenue. (Besides, NVIDIA gets non-voting shares in OpenAI.) Deals like these are one of the few ways OpenAI can sustain growing in capacity, but it comes at a huge premium. That's one of the reasons they need the IPO, to get access to cheaper money. [0]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-is-the-2025-yahoo-finance-company-of-the-year-120054312.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-is-the-2025-yahoo-fina... [1]https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/22/nvidia-openai-data-center.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/22/nvidia-openai-data-center.ht...