OpenAI revenue keeps surging as company seeks $30 billion in fresh capital

OpenAI's annualized revenue rate stood at roughly $50 billion at the end of September, according to the Financial Times, correcting a previously reported figure of nearly $70 billion. Axios reports that the higher number was based on a calculation designed to make OpenAI's revenue more comparable to Anthropic's.

The gap is an accounting question about how each company books partner sales. Anthropic records the full customer payment when selling through cloud partners, then logs the cloud provider's cut as an expense. OpenAI only counts its own share as revenue for certain partner deals. Both methods comply with US GAAP standards, according to Axios, and the difference depends on each company's role in the transaction, meaning who controls the customer relationship and who is responsible for delivering the product.

The correction had immediate market effects. After the Financial Times report landed, tech stocks took a hit, with chip stocks dropping several percent. The selloff illustrates how closely the market tracks the two biggest US AI companies and how jittery investors have become.

Separately, OpenAI expects to hit an annualized revenue rate of at least $70 billion by the end of 2026, according to Bloomberg, which says the company shared the figures during talks about a new funding round. The main driver is the expanding enterprise business. Overall annualized revenue grew 77 percent in the third quarter, while enterprise revenue jumped 107 percent, CNBC reports.

OpenAI is negotiating at least $30 billion in new capital at a target pre-money valuation of $1.4 trillion. For comparison, in March the company raised up to $122 billion at a post-money valuation of $852 billion.

The nervousness around these numbers may help explain why Anthropic is moving cautiously on its IPO and why OpenAI has already pushed its own public offering to next year. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently blamed the delay on safety risks, but the postponement was already in the works well before the cybersecurity incidents of recent months. Back in April, reports surfaced that OpenAI had missed its internal growth targets.

Earlier reporting from late September framed the situation differently. At that point, OpenAI was described as nearing a $70 billion annualized revenue rate, up about 70 percent since the start of the third quarter. The annualized revenue rate metric projects current monthly revenue over a full year. Anthropic's rate reportedly passed $65 billion in July and may now match or exceed OpenAI's, with Anthropic preparing an IPO as early as November.

OpenAI's growth has been driven by enterprise sales and an aggressive price war against Claude and Chinese models, a strategy the company doubled down on with the launch of GPT-6.1-Sol. The Codex coding assistant is also growing fast, riding the popularity of the GPT-6 model family. At DevDay, OpenAI shared updated usage numbers: more than 1.2 billion weekly ChatGPT users, over 35 million weekly ChatGPT Work and Codex users, and 2.5 million businesses using OpenAI products.

Taken together, the numbers feed directly into the AI bubble debate. The central question is whether revenue growth at AI companies can keep pace with their massive spending commitments on compute buildouts over the long run. That will likely hinge on measurable productivity gains that companies can actually point to.

One thing to note about the revenue figure itself: annualized revenue rate is a forward-looking projection, not a booked total. It takes the most recent month's revenue and multiplies it by twelve, which means it can move sharply with a single strong or weak month and is sensitive to how partner deals are recognized. The accounting difference between OpenAI and Anthropic matters for developers and product teams because it changes how the two companies' growth can be compared. A headline claiming Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI — or vice versa — may rest on a recognition choice rather than a difference in underlying demand.

Why it matters: The correction from nearly $70 billion to about $50 billion shows how much a single accounting decision can shift the headline revenue number investors and partners rely on. For teams evaluating OpenAI as a long-term platform, the continued growth — 77 percent overall and 107 percent in enterprise — alongside a $30 billion raise suggests capacity and pricing pressure will keep building. Inference: if the funding round closes, expect continued aggressive pricing as OpenAI defends share against Anthropic and Chinese models.