OpenAI missed its internal revenue and user growth targets that justified its $852 billion valuation, while Anthropic surpassed it in annualized revenue despite starting 2025 with one sixth of OpenAI's revenue base—though the comparison is complicated by different accounting…
OpenAI Raised $122 Billion at an $852 Billion Valuation. That Number Is Already in Dispute.
When OpenAI and Anthropic report revenue, they are not counting the same thing. Anthropic counts every dollar customers pay it directly. OpenAI subtracts what it pays cloud providers for the computing power that runs its models first. Khosla Ventures, an early OpenAI investor, calls the two companies' annual figures "incomparable" — and has published that assessment publicly, Reuters reported on April 8th. Whether that matters to public market investors is now the central question as both companies prepare for IPO.
The dispute matters because OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history in March: $122 billion at an $852 billion post-money valuation. The benchmarks it cited to justify that number — monthly sales targets and a goal of 1 billion weekly ChatGPT users by the end of 2025 — were missed, The Wall Street Journal reported. Khosla partner Ethan Choi has since argued the revenue comparison that shows Anthropic pulling ahead is itself misleading, because the two companies use different accounting. OpenAI says its net figure is the accurate one.
The enterprise market is where the divergence shows up most directly. Contracts paying $1 million or more per year, for AI coding assistants, document processing, and other high-volume workloads, are the ones that will define the next decade of the industry. Anthropic now has more than 1,000 enterprise customers spending at that level, doubling from the 500 it reported in February 2026, according to Trending Topics EU. OpenAI's enterprise API market share fell from 50 percent in 2023 to 25 percent by mid-2025, while Anthropic's rose from 12 percent to 32 percent in the same period, Techi reported. Epoch AI had predicted the revenue crossover would arrive around mid-2026; it arrived in April.
Anthropic began 2025 generating $1 billion in annualized revenue against OpenAI's $6 billion. OpenAI has responded by killing Sora, its AI video product, which cost an estimated $15 million per day to run, according to an analysis by Miraflow, and redirecting the freed compute toward Codex, its enterprise coding tool. OpenAI has 900 million weekly active users and says it is generating $2 billion per month in revenue. Whether any of that is enough to justify the valuation both companies are now asking public markets to accept is the question neither has answered yet.