The Eight Billion Dollar Question Hanging Over the AI Race

Anthropic is worth $1 trillion on the secondary market. Denise Dresser thinks that number is fiction.

Secondary markets, where private company shares change hands between investors outside public exchanges, are the closest thing the AI industry has to a stock price. By that measure, Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI. The valuation, reported by Business Insider, reflects investor belief that Claude Code's enterprise adoption and the company's compute partnership deals have created something durable. It also reflects a great deal of optimism about what private-company accounting will eventually confirm.

OpenAI's chief revenue officer has a different view. In a four-page leaked memo sent to employees last Sunday, Denise Dresser argued that roughly $8 billion of Anthropic's stated $30 billion annualized revenue run rate comes from accounting treatment that inflates revenue-share payments from Amazon and Google, making the number look bigger than it is. The memo, published in full by The Verge, was written by a CRO whose job is to win enterprise deals against a competitor. OpenAI declined to comment. Anthropic declined to comment.

The accusation is not new. Revenue-run-rate figures for private companies are always partly narrative. They reflect annualized trailing receipts, forward projections, and accounting choices that would be adjudicated differently in an SEC filing. What makes Dresser's memo notable is not the allegation itself, which is plausible on its face, but the venue: a company-wide memo that everyone knew would leak, written by someone with every strategic incentive to undercut a rival's enterprise pitch at a moment when that rival is commanding a trillion-dollar valuation.

Here is what is confirmed. Anthropic reported $9 billion in revenue run rate at the end of 2025. By early April 2026, that figure had reached $30 billion, according to a company blog post corroborated by Bloomberg and Reuters. The jump was driven in large part by Claude Code, the AI coding tool that hit $2.5 billion in annualized revenue by February 2026, more than doubling in weeks. That product trajectory is extraordinary by any measure of enterprise software adoption.

OpenAI's own leadership has spent the past several months reorganizing around the products a smaller rival invented. Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of applications, told employees in March that the company's success should be treated as a code red, according to PYMNTS citing the Wall Street Journal. A separate internal memo from mid-March urged OpenAI to eliminate side quests and focus on the enterprise and coding markets Anthropic had colonized. OpenAI subsequently shelved Sora, its video generation product, and launched an aggressive advertising campaign for Codex, its coding tool.

What is not confirmed is whether the $8 billion figure in Dresser's memo is accurate, understated, or wildly inflated. Anthropic's revenue includes substantial payments from Amazon and Google for cloud compute partnerships. Under ASC 606, revenue from these arrangements can be recognized either on a gross basis or a net basis. The choice matters enormously at scale. If Anthropic is recognizing gross partnership revenue and OpenAI is recognizing net revenue, the comparison Dresser draws is real but the gap is partly an accounting artifact rather than a business-performance gap.

Anthropic has not published detailed revenue breakdowns. OpenAI has not published its own comparable figures for the period in question. Both companies are private enough that the dispute cannot be adjudicated by looking at a stock price.

What is clear is that both companies need the numbers to hold. Both are preparing for public markets. Both are asking investors to price a technology that does not yet have a standard valuation methodology. The company that can credibly claim the higher revenue, the faster growth, and the stickier enterprise relationships will have a meaningful advantage in that process.

The Atlantic published a long essay this week arguing that OpenAI is simply jealous of Anthropic. Jealousy is an emotion. The Dresser memo is a specific allegation about a specific number. Whether that number holds up is the only question that matters for the trillion-dollar valuation sitting in secondary markets today. What to watch: both companies are expected to file detailed financials ahead of any public offering, which will force the ASC 606 question into the open.