The market is selling off on “news” that is barely news.
OpenAI reportedly told investors that its annualized revenue was approaching $50B at the end of September, rather than the ~$70B figure that was widely reported last month.
But the gap largely comes down to accounting methodology, not a $20B hole in OpenAI’s business.
Anthropic counts revenue generated through cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI apparently does not. Investors had therefore adjusted OpenAI’s reported figures to make them comparable with Anthropic’s, which helped produce the ~$70B estimate.
So we are essentially talking about whether revenue flowing through cloud partners is included in the headline number or not.
That is a comparability issue, not some sudden collapse in OpenAI’s revenue trajectory.
The fact that the market is treating this as a major negative for AI is, frankly, pretty ridiculous.