There’s been a debate in certain nerdier circles of the tech industry about comparing the revenues of Anthropic and OpenAI and I have at least part of the answer.
But first, a word of warning. I’ve been covering the industry long enough that the pattern is clear: The numbers you see leaking in the press hardly ever match up when companies actually go public and have to adhere to regulatory and public investor scrutiny.
As The Information wrote in March, the companies report revenue differently when they sell their tokens through cloud partners like AWS, Google and Microsoft. For instance, when a customer purchases $1 worth of tokens through a cloud partner, OpenAI counts its 20-cent cut as revenue, according to people familiar with the matter. By contrast, Anthropic counts the whole $1 as revenue, these people say.
The percentages that OpenAI and Anthropic get from partnerships vary, making it difficult to figure out how to normalize the revenue numbers across both companies. But the different accounting tactics translate into a discrepancy of up to $8 billion in annualized revenue, according to a person familiar with the numbers. That’s based on how much OpenAI would add to its run rate if it counted gross revenue instead of net revenue.
Anthropic is still gaining on OpenAI’s revenue, but the blurry projections suggest it hasn’t quite eclipsed the ChatGPT maker.