OpenAI revenue: $50 billion, not $70 billion, at the end of September

The numbers for OpenAI's revenue have varied quite a bit lately. According to the Financial Times (FT), OpenAI has told investors that the company's annualized revenue at the end of September was close to $50 billion.

Annualized revenue means taking the income from a shorter period and converting it to a full year. It is not the revenue the company has already collected.

Where did $70 billion come from?

About a week earlier, media outlets had reported that OpenAI's annualized revenue was approaching $70 billion. According to the FT, that figure did not come from OpenAI itself. It came from investors who were trying to compare OpenAI directly with its rival Anthropic.

That comparison is tricky because the two companies count differently. Anthropic includes sales through its cloud partners. OpenAI does not. According to The Next Web, OpenAI counts only its 20 percent share of revenue from the partnership with Microsoft, while Anthropic counts gross sales through partners such as AWS and Google Cloud.

$70 billion is still a target

It is not accurate to call it a downward revision of a forecast. According to Bloomberg, OpenAI still expects annualized revenue of at least $70 billion by the end of the year. That expectation was shared with investors in connection with the current funding round. It is a plan, not something that has happened.

OpenAI has also said that total annualized revenue grew 77 percent in the third quarter, and that the enterprise segment grew 107 percent.

Background

In March, OpenAI raised $122 billion in a funding round. Leaked financial figures for 2025 showed revenue of around $13 billion and significantly higher expenses. According to TechCrunch, OpenAI's IPO, which was previously rumored for this year, has been postponed to early 2027.

For readers, the takeaway is that AI companies' revenue figures cannot always be compared directly. How you count can move the number by many billions.