OpenAI vs Anthropic: Which AI Company Will Win?

Here’s a news flash: The quasi-revenue numbers for OpenAI that got wide circulation last week were off— way off. Instead of $70 billion in annualized revenue, as we and others reported, OpenAI is generating closer to $50 billion in annualized revenue (sometimes shortened to ARR). A Financial Times report of the lower number on Thursday proved such a shock to investors that stocks of chip firms and neoclouds, including Nvidia, CoreWeave, Nebius and others, fell on the news, CNBC reported. The cause of this debacle is complicated. But it’s a reminder that we all rely too much on annualized revenue as a way to track a company’s performance. It’s become a standard measure for AI companies because their revenue has been growing by leaps and bounds, making the more common quarterly reports seem a little quaint in their backward-looking nature. But taking one month’s revenue and multiplying it by 12, as is the standard way these annualized-revenue numbers are calculated, is a poor substitute for a fuller picture of a company’s performance. We don’t know enough about what happens in that one month to know whether we can accurately extrapolate it by 12. The risk is compounded by differences between OpenAI and Anthropic in how revenue is calculated, particularly whether it includes the cut paid to cloud firms. Then there’s the fact that companies publish these numbers in very occasional blog posts, but not on any kind of regular basis. Much of the time news reports about ARR numbers appear based on communications with investors, which then find their way to reporters. And, as occurred with the mistaken $70 billion figure, sometimes investors and news outlets do clunky calculations that lead to errors. This issue should recede when the #Artificial Intelligence firms go public. That doesn’t mean they’ll stop issuing annualized-revenue estimates, as some public companies have started to do. But at least we’ll see the real numbers and be better equipped to assess what’s going on. Right now—aside from the occasional leak of detailed financial statements—we’re in the dark. cnbc.com/2026/10/08/open-..

Anthropic’s compute efficiency is a reality check for AI skeptics (theinformation.com/articl..) Everyone's losing their minds over Anthropic's hardware diversification, but let's be real—they just learned how to squeeze every last drop out of non-Nvidia chips while OpenAI was busy babysitting millions of free ChatGPT users. Classic tortoise-and-hare energy

Anthropic moves to lock in enterprise customers (theinformation.com/articl..).

AI use within Anthropic may have doubled the company’s pace of AI development, a new report from AI research nonprofit METR says. dev.to/gabrielanhaia/metr..