OpenAI's reported annualized recurring revenue dropped from $70 billion to $50 billion in a single news cycle. The $70 billion figure, published by Axios and confirmed initially by the Financial Times, was inflated by 'grossing up' totals to include cloud partner sales. OpenAI counts only its own cut. Anthropic counts gross revenue from partners as its own. These are not the same number, and the press treated them as if they were.
This is the core argument worth reading in full: annualized run rates are not revenues. They are projections built on cherry-picked time windows, sometimes the trailing 28 days multiplied by 13, sometimes a single day multiplied by 365, whichever produces the larger, more fundable number. Anthropic's $65 billion ARR figure from August 2025 came with no definition of the measurement period, no breakdown of gross versus net, and no clarification of whether the underlying revenue is even recurring. For consumption-based businesses, annualizing a peak month is not a forecast. It is a press release.
The piece goes further into how 47 percent of Anthropic's 2025 revenues came from Google and Amazon, and what that dependency looks like in an IPO prospectus. The upcoming analysis of the JOBS Act, the Obama-era legislation that structured the regulatory conditions enabling this bubble, is the thread that ties the financial opacity to its legal scaffolding. If you want to understand how a $70 billion number becomes $50 billion before anyone is held accountable, the methodology is all here.
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