OpenAI ARR Said to Be $20B Below Reported Figures as Gross-vs-Net Math Draws Scrutiny
The Financial Times reported that OpenAI's annualized revenue figure, circulated to investors as part of its current funding round, is about $20 billion below a widely cited $70 billion number, and AI stocks fell Thursday on the news. The gap largely reflects a gross-versus-net distinction: Anthropic's figure includes model sales by partners such as Amazon and Microsoft, which take a cut, while OpenAI had been using a net figure. Bloomberg later reported that OpenAI expects to reach $70 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year, with the assumption that this is net rather than gross. Separately, new open-weight models — Reflection's Beam, Mistral's Large 4 and Germany's Aleph Alpha Kolibri — launched with an AI-sovereignty pitch, though investors said national origin matters little to most of their portfolio companies.
Without transparent revenue definitions, investors, employees and customers struggle to judge real growth and valuations at the leading labs.