The "digital game" behind the trillion-dollar valuation: OpenAI and Anthropic's revenue cannot be directly compared

Wall Street reports pointed out that due to fundamental differences in the accounting methods of core financial indicators, OpenAI and Anthropic, the two leading companies in the field of artificial intelligence, it is difficult for investors to make direct comparisons and the market has fallen into a state of information ambiguity. According to Bloomberg's disclosure on October 10, the two companies have completely different statistical standards on the key indicator of "annualized revenue." Specifically, Anthropic includes all sales generated through cloud service partners such as Amazon into revenue statistics, while OpenAI only calculates the share of net revenue it receives from partners such as Microsoft. Although OpenAI expects its annualized revenue to reach or exceed US$70 billion by the end of the year, and Anthropic achieved annualized revenue of US$65 billion as early as July this year, this difference essentially reflects two different accounting treatment models. It is worth noting that this difference in statistical caliber does not mean that OpenAI's actual business volume is inferior to Anthropic. The stock price fluctuations in the technology sector this week on Thursday have already demonstrated the market impact of this disagreement.