Report: China's six AI leaders earn about 10% of OpenAI and Anthropic revenue
An Epoch AI report estimates that, as of September 2026, the combined AI-related revenue of Alibaba, ByteDance, Zhipu, Moonshot AI, DeepSeek and MiniMax was roughly 10% of OpenAI and Anthropic's combined total. It puts Anthropic's annualized revenue at about $65 billion and OpenAI's at about $40 billion, against roughly $10 billion for the six Chinese firms: ByteDance about $4 billion, Alibaba about $2.4 billion, Zhipu about $1.8 billion, Moonshot AI and DeepSeek about $1 billion each, and MiniMax about $0.8 billion, with the ByteDance and Alibaba figures mainly reflecting model-as-a-service revenue. The report maps five monetization paths — consumer apps, API access, enterprise and government custom work, licensing and indirect gains through existing ecosystems — and notes that open-weight releases speed diffusion while eroding API pricing power, leaving pure model makers to weigh openness against monetization.
The comparison quantifies the revenue gap between US and Chinese frontier AI labs and shows Chinese vendors shifting from bespoke deployments toward APIs and cloud revenue-sharing.