$2b/month which is $24b/year. Not as much as I expected considering they were at $20b by end of 2025.[0] They only added $4b since?
Anthropic had $19b by end of February 2026 and they added $6b in February alone.[1] This means if they added another $6b in March, they're higher than OpenAI already.
However, I heard that OpenAI and Anthropic report revenue in a different way. OpenAI takes 20% of revenue from Azure sales and reports revenue on that 20%. Anthropic reports all revenue, including AWS's share.[2]
They aren't reporting anything yet. What we hearing is just from news media who get their leaks/info from investors who get some form of IR reports/ presentation.
Both will do public reporting only when they IPO[4] and have regulatory requirement to do so every quarter.
For private companies[1] reporting to investors there are no fixed rules really[3]
Even for public companies, there is fair amount of leeway on how GAAP[2]expects recognize revenue. The two ways you highlight is how you account for GMV- Gross Merchandise Value.
The operating margin becomes very less so multiples on absolute revenue gets impacted when you consider GMV as revenue.
For example if you consider GMV in revenue then AMZN only trades at ~3x ($2.25T/$~800B )to say MSFT($2.75T/$300B) and GOOG ($3.4T/$400B) who both trade at 9x their revenue.
While roughly similar in maturity, size, growth potential and even large overlap of directly competing businesses, there is huge (3x / 9x) difference because AMZN's number includes with GMV in retail that GOOG and MSFT do not have in same size in theirs.
---
[1] There are still a lot of rules reporting to IRS and other government entities, but that information we (and news media) get is from investors not leaks from government reporting - which would be typically be private and illegal to disclose to public.
[2] And the Big 4 who sign off on the audit for companies prefer to account for it.
[3] As long as it is not explicit fraud or cooking the books, i.e. they are transparent about their methods.
[4] Strictly this would be covered in the prospectus(S-1) few weeks before going public and that is first real look we get into the details.
Does the GAAP accounting matter if everyone passively buys shares due to the new fast entry rules, which corruptly will force us all to buy into these companies? The fundamentals and true value seem less relevant than ever:
For other readers, I want to add some context here. NASDAQ is pondering whether or not to change their NASDAQ 100 index membership rules for IPOs. Currently, there is a three month waiting rule for IPOs. They are proposing (not sure if passed/agree/completed yet) to remove this waiting rule for IPOs.
Real question: What is the real impact of this rule change? To me, it seems so minor. Three months is just a blip in time for any long term investor.
> which corruptly will force us all to buy into these companies
Why is this "corrupt"? That term makes no sense here.
Also, if you don't like the NASDAQ 100 rules, then you don't have to invest in securities that track it. You can trade the basket yourself minus the names that you don't like.
Finally, I would say that S&P 500 index is far more important than NASDAQ 100. To join the S&P 500 index, the name must be profitable for the most recent year. (four quarters). Recall that Uber IPO'd in 2019, but was not profitable until 2023. OpenAI probably will not be profitable when it goes public; thus, it will not join the S&P 500 immediately.
I think the bigger story is SpaceX. It will likely IPO very close to a 1T USD market cap (with a small float: ~10%). And, thanks to StarLink, I assume that SpaceX is now wildly profitable.
The "corruption" allegation is that for, yes, SpaceX, index funds will effectively be "forced" to buy in right away at their IPO price, rather than seeing where they settle before getting the money in. Given that most people have most of their money in index funds, it's sort-of an automatic buy and raises some hackles about a fixed game.
Saying "you can trade the basket yourself minus the names you don't like" is not a real counterargument. Most of us are not going to do that, I'm not going to do that and I'm writing this post right now. John Doe is certainly not doing that.
> Also, if you don't like the NASDAQ 100 rules, then you don't have to invest in securities that track it.
Isn't the idea with the indexes that they allow you to intentionally not take an activist position in the market? The exposure is not tied to any underlying market hypothesis. In other words, if we make people form a market hypothesis in order to decide whether or not to hold this index, it has failed in its purpose.
Diluting the index entry rules, only devalues the index utility. When it becomes a bigger problem, other indices with higher quality controls will out compete the current ones and be used by asset managers seeking safety.
More likely than not, most of us are already holding stock in these companies one way or another. All the Mag 7 hold a major chunk of OAI and Anthropic stock anyway, slower entry does not make it less risky for us.
Even if the big tech companies did not hold any stock, they are still the biggest vendors and their own order books is hugely impacted by the AI demand from these two ( and others in this space), either way we are all in this together.
You can just choose not to play the accounting game, and only choose the ones that actually gaap viable as investment opportunities. For example mag7 - tesla are all relatively cheap when they dip.
Some times the best play is just not to play. If you think they are too risky, walk away. There are enough good oppotunities
They aren't reporting anything yet. What we hearing is just from news media who get their leaks/info from investors who get some form of IR reports/ presentation.
The $24b figure is literally in OpenAI's announcement.
The $19b ARR and $6b added in Feb came directly from Anthropic CEO recently.
$20b is December 2025 revenue multiplied by 12. Actual 2025 annual booked revenue is more in the order of $13b[0].
Also, those $122b raised are not cash-in-hand.
For example, NVIDIA commits to $30b, but OpenAI must build 5gw inference+training capacity using NVIDIA's Ruby Vera systems. NVIDIA's Huang has said[1] that in 1gw of compute, around $35b are NVIDIA hardware. So that $30b investment from NVIDIA goes back to NVIDIA as $175b in revenue. (Besides, NVIDIA gets non-voting shares in OpenAI.)
Deals like these are one of the few ways OpenAI can sustain growing in capacity, but it comes at a huge premium. That's one of the reasons they need the IPO, to get access to cheaper money.
And that is revenue only. In the past 15 or so years most US companies (and especially startups) always talk about revenue only. Wheras only profit should matter.
E.g. what good is 20 billion per year when "OpenAI is targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spending through 2030". That is $150 billion per year?
This announcement completes the betrayal of their founding principles.
"Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return."
- Not advancing digital intelligence
- While locking people into a superapp
- Because they are further constrained to generating financial returns
> Today, we closed our latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at a post money valuation of $852 billion.
A couple things that stand out to me about this is the use of the phrase "committed capital", which only sounds like a promise that could break from various circumstances, and the valuation of their funding keeps changing so it sounds like a max rather than the valuation every investor invested at.
The title is incorrect. The $122B includes previous promises. They raised an additional $12B of promises:
"The round totaled $122 billion of committed capital, up from the $110 billion figure that the company announced in February. SoftBank co-led the round alongside other investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and D. E. Shaw Ventures, OpenAI said."
This IPO, if anyone underwrites it, is going to fleece retail so hard. Better make it a SPAC with the help of Chamath and Cantor & Fitzgerald.
> The broad consumer reach of ChatGPT creates a powerful distribution channel into the workplace
They mention this line in different forms a couple of times in the article. It’s clear they’re pretty rattled about Anthropic’s momentum in enterprise, I wonder how confident they really are in this rationale.
No, they didn't raise $122B as the HN title implies. A big chunk of that $122B is a "maybe" that depends on various things that need to happen in the future.
Oh, man... I can't wait to see where this is going. Might not be pretty after all.
LLMs are definitely a game changing technology, but there is just so much fake money in the market right now (circular deals, paper valuations, etc.) that I cannot take this seriously. At some point the musical chairs will stop and we will all be saying how could we let this happen? Where are the regulators (rhetorical question)?
I'm old enough to remember when companies worth $1 billion were called "unicorns." Now we have a company raising 122 times that? Valued at nearly 1000 times that...?
At least they're throwing consumers a bone via the ARK deal. It's crazy how little AI exposure is available to anyone who isn't already wealthy and/or connected.
I lost track when business analysts stopped analysing CEO-level commitments and outputs and performance.
right now, it seems that whatever promise is taken as certain and company puffery (using the language invented by themselves) is taken lightly to tricky investor in throwing money.
the whole thing did not yet crash because it seems they can still promise even more without actually delivering definite results
I can't help but think building an "everything" app is so.. both unbelievably ambitious, and a folly. I am not personally convinced that people want all the things that this super app purports to do.
I am from a generation that still sits behind a desktop computer when making "big purchases." I can't even buy a flight on my phone. I am so much less likely to want to have an AI agent do that for me.
Then the idea that daily consumption of these products will drive people to use them more at work... I have a very different life outside of work. My use of AI outside of work is exceedingly different to what I use it for at work.
I sometimes feel wildly out of touch. But sometimes I view this as the VR moment. To me there are some things that I think may always be preferable to do outside of that ecosystem. And for me, a lot of tasks that 'agents' enable are small enough or important enough that I want to do them myself.
I don't think I'll ever be comfortable allowing an agent to call me a taxi, or order food on my behalf. Because the convenience of asking for food isn't worth the chance it'll mess up, and opening an app and looking at a menu is simpler.
I also think we're coming to a moment where we can start identifying the markers of AI generated content on sight. And I think there's a growing animosity to it. I might be comfortable asking AI something, but when I am looking for or searching for other content, seeing AI content markers make me angry at this point.
To finish, I do just sort of straight up hate the idea that we're comparing this moment to the invention of electricity. It's on the face of it absurd.
No mention of "AGI" this time. Since we all knew it was a scam. But this is the most damning of them all:
> The OpenAI flywheel is simple. More compute drives more intelligent models. More intelligent models drive better products. Better products drive faster adoption, more revenue and more cashflow.
FTX had a "flywheel". It fell off. Being saddled with hundreds of billions of debt makes this situation ten times worse.
I get the appetite for frontier models. But why not just invest in Google. Do they really expect the return profile of OpenAI to be vastly different than Google’s Gemini?
I hate to read this line when academics and graduate students who work in basic and hard sciences have their funding cut. The grand funding that pays minimum wage to grad students is a burden for this society, yet for a company that took all the valuable data from sources that never got credit, raises billions of dollars. Open says the name, but closed it is by operation. Sorry for this rant, but the priorities of this world suck.
This all smells fishy. They didn’t “raise” $122B. Raise means someone put funds in your bank account and said send us the next quarterly report to tell us how our investment is doing.
They have pieces from paper of folks saying they may put up funds or goods and services in that amount. But it’s important to remember that:
1. While they are “raising” commitments others are backing out of deals (see Disney, various data center things). Big deals announced to major fanfare are falling through.
2. They slashed capital expenditure for the future after previously boasting about all the commitments. This is turning into bonkers math of X + Y - X + Z + W - 1/2 of Y = ? On trying to keep track of what’s actually “raised / real” vs what was PR puffery that folks ran away from later.
3. Circular financing still seems to be going on. Big difference of here’s cash, have fun and various “commitments” and balance sheet games that seem to still be going on.
Net net this all still looks very scary and iffy at best.
Almost a trillion for a company that hasn’t proved it can reach any form of profitability, all on the promise of an elusive messianic concept of machine superintelligence through probabilistic algorithms.
Basically like praying cancer away.
Peak magical thinking, peak America.
This leak and looking into source code gave me an impulse to try OpenCode with codex models. I am very impressed with how well it works, and the UI is beautiful.
feels like an insult to readers to try to pretend that their revenue per month is comparable to google or apples growth when the funding is absurdly different, not to mention inflation itself.
I am very much onboard with AI within my workflow. I just don't really see a future where openai/anthropic are the absolute front runners for devs though. Maybe OpenAI does just have the better vision by targeting the general public instead, and just competing to become the next google before google can just stay google?
What is their next step to ensure local models never overtake them? If i could use opus 4.6 as a local model isntead and wrap it in someone else's cli tool, i 100% do it today. are the future model's gonna be so far beyond in capability that this sounds foolish? the top models are more than enough to keep up with my own features before i can think of more... so how do they stretch further than that?
A side note i keep thinking about, how impossible is a world where open source base models are collectively trained similar to a proof of work style pool, and then smaller companies simply spin off their own finishing touches or whatever based on that base model? am i thinking of thinks too simplistically? is this not a possibility?
Does anyone know if this, like the spacex/xAI stock — will list on nasdaq? And will it be part of every market cap weighted index fund like VOO(S&P) etc or just for nasdax-100 etfs?
The exchanges are bending head over heels to accommodate these IPOs[1] and make our retirement index funds the exit-liquidity strategy to the thievery of pump and dump actors that buy it low and then sell high? As i understand the way thievery works is:
1. List at many multiples of market valuation on an exchange. So if you company is just 10 billion$ nasdaq and theives collude and say "can make it 100 billion..".
2. Lots of institutional investors and rich billionaires get stock options.
3. All market weighted index funds — aka all *your* low expense ratio ETF money — have to re-balance and buy them, raising their value: the exit-liquidity event
4. Rich A**** get richer by making an profit by selling higher.
Fortunately, OpenAI's naming didn't cause a wave of greedy and predatory new companies, like OpenHealth, OpenEnergy, OpenCompute. The non-sexy name of their product using the originating algorithm (GPT) is punishing them. It could be anything else more attractive that would bring more customers. Because, for me, a good, inspiratory, engaging name is half the success.
the only lesson the common man should take from these valuations: start to protest against AI conpanies being included in the sp500!
unless you're a private investors in these preIPO, the whole plan is to get big enough, get forced entry into indexes, and leave early with everyone else holding the bag.
What if all the people currently using these "AI" services are the entire market for those services? I'm pretty sure everyone that wants to use LLMs is already doing so and already paying for the service.
That would mean the only way to increase growth would be to charge more per token and to get the existing people to use more tokens. Both of which seem to be only what mature companies do when trying to squeeze the cash cow for all it's worth.
It also explains why they're trying to stuff AI into everything, to keep the numbers up, and to get everyone to try and pay them money.
497 comments
Anthropic had $19b by end of February 2026 and they added $6b in February alone.[1] This means if they added another $6b in March, they're higher than OpenAI already.
However, I heard that OpenAI and Anthropic report revenue in a different way. OpenAI takes 20% of revenue from Azure sales and reports revenue on that 20%. Anthropic reports all revenue, including AWS's share.[2]
[0]https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-cfo-says-annualized-...
[1]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/anthropic-arr-surges-19-billi...
[2]https://x.com/EthanChoi7/status/2036638459868385394
Both will do public reporting only when they IPO[4] and have regulatory requirement to do so every quarter. For private companies[1] reporting to investors there are no fixed rules really[3]
Even for public companies, there is fair amount of leeway on how GAAP[2]expects recognize revenue. The two ways you highlight is how you account for GMV- Gross Merchandise Value.
The operating margin becomes very less so multiples on absolute revenue gets impacted when you consider GMV as revenue.
For example if you consider GMV in revenue then AMZN only trades at ~3x ($2.25T/$~800B )to say MSFT($2.75T/$300B) and GOOG ($3.4T/$400B) who both trade at 9x their revenue.
While roughly similar in maturity, size, growth potential and even large overlap of directly competing businesses, there is huge (3x / 9x) difference because AMZN's number includes with GMV in retail that GOOG and MSFT do not have in same size in theirs.
---
[1] There are still a lot of rules reporting to IRS and other government entities, but that information we (and news media) get is from investors not leaks from government reporting - which would be typically be private and illegal to disclose to public.
[2] And the Big 4 who sign off on the audit for companies prefer to account for it.
[3] As long as it is not explicit fraud or cooking the books, i.e. they are transparent about their methods.
[4] Strictly this would be covered in the prospectus(S-1) few weeks before going public and that is first real look we get into the details.
https://www.benzinga.com/markets/tech/26/03/51248353/michael...
Real question: What is the real impact of this rule change? To me, it seems so minor. Three months is just a blip in time for any long term investor.
Why is this "corrupt"? That term makes no sense here.Also, if you don't like the NASDAQ 100 rules, then you don't have to invest in securities that track it. You can trade the basket yourself minus the names that you don't like.
Finally, I would say that S&P 500 index is far more important than NASDAQ 100. To join the S&P 500 index, the name must be profitable for the most recent year. (four quarters). Recall that Uber IPO'd in 2019, but was not profitable until 2023. OpenAI probably will not be profitable when it goes public; thus, it will not join the S&P 500 immediately.
I think the bigger story is SpaceX. It will likely IPO very close to a 1T USD market cap (with a small float: ~10%). And, thanks to StarLink, I assume that SpaceX is now wildly profitable.
Saying "you can trade the basket yourself minus the names you don't like" is not a real counterargument. Most of us are not going to do that, I'm not going to do that and I'm writing this post right now. John Doe is certainly not doing that.
> Also, if you don't like the NASDAQ 100 rules, then you don't have to invest in securities that track it.
Isn't the idea with the indexes that they allow you to intentionally not take an activist position in the market? The exposure is not tied to any underlying market hypothesis. In other words, if we make people form a market hypothesis in order to decide whether or not to hold this index, it has failed in its purpose.
More likely than not, most of us are already holding stock in these companies one way or another. All the Mag 7 hold a major chunk of OAI and Anthropic stock anyway, slower entry does not make it less risky for us.
Even if the big tech companies did not hold any stock, they are still the biggest vendors and their own order books is hugely impacted by the AI demand from these two ( and others in this space), either way we are all in this together.
You can just choose not to play the accounting game, and only choose the ones that actually gaap viable as investment opportunities. For example mag7 - tesla are all relatively cheap when they dip.
Some times the best play is just not to play. If you think they are too risky, walk away. There are enough good oppotunities
The $19b ARR and $6b added in Feb came directly from Anthropic CEO recently.
Also, those $122b raised are not cash-in-hand.
For example, NVIDIA commits to $30b, but OpenAI must build 5gw inference+training capacity using NVIDIA's Ruby Vera systems. NVIDIA's Huang has said[1] that in 1gw of compute, around $35b are NVIDIA hardware. So that $30b investment from NVIDIA goes back to NVIDIA as $175b in revenue. (Besides, NVIDIA gets non-voting shares in OpenAI.)
Deals like these are one of the few ways OpenAI can sustain growing in capacity, but it comes at a huge premium. That's one of the reasons they need the IPO, to get access to cheaper money.
[0]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-is-the-2025-yahoo-fina...
[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/22/nvidia-openai-data-center.ht...
E.g. what good is 20 billion per year when "OpenAI is targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spending through 2030". That is $150 billion per year?
"Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return."
> Today, we closed our latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at a post money valuation of $852 billion.
A couple things that stand out to me about this is the use of the phrase "committed capital", which only sounds like a promise that could break from various circumstances, and the valuation of their funding keeps changing so it sounds like a max rather than the valuation every investor invested at.
"The round totaled $122 billion of committed capital, up from the $110 billion figure that the company announced in February. SoftBank co-led the round alongside other investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and D. E. Shaw Ventures, OpenAI said."
This IPO, if anyone underwrites it, is going to fleece retail so hard. Better make it a SPAC with the help of Chamath and Cantor & Fitzgerald.
> The broad consumer reach of ChatGPT creates a powerful distribution channel into the workplace
They mention this line in different forms a couple of times in the article. It’s clear they’re pretty rattled about Anthropic’s momentum in enterprise, I wonder how confident they really are in this rationale.
> This is not just product simplification. It is a distribution and deployment strategy.
iykyk
Oh, man... I can't wait to see where this is going. Might not be pretty after all.
Edit: Why did this go from their press release to a news story?
At least they're throwing consumers a bone via the ARK deal. It's crazy how little AI exposure is available to anyone who isn't already wealthy and/or connected.
the whole thing did not yet crash because it seems they can still promise even more without actually delivering definite results
I am from a generation that still sits behind a desktop computer when making "big purchases." I can't even buy a flight on my phone. I am so much less likely to want to have an AI agent do that for me.
Then the idea that daily consumption of these products will drive people to use them more at work... I have a very different life outside of work. My use of AI outside of work is exceedingly different to what I use it for at work.
I sometimes feel wildly out of touch. But sometimes I view this as the VR moment. To me there are some things that I think may always be preferable to do outside of that ecosystem. And for me, a lot of tasks that 'agents' enable are small enough or important enough that I want to do them myself.
I don't think I'll ever be comfortable allowing an agent to call me a taxi, or order food on my behalf. Because the convenience of asking for food isn't worth the chance it'll mess up, and opening an app and looking at a menu is simpler.
I also think we're coming to a moment where we can start identifying the markers of AI generated content on sight. And I think there's a growing animosity to it. I might be comfortable asking AI something, but when I am looking for or searching for other content, seeing AI content markers make me angry at this point.
To finish, I do just sort of straight up hate the idea that we're comparing this moment to the invention of electricity. It's on the face of it absurd.
> The OpenAI flywheel is simple. More compute drives more intelligent models. More intelligent models drive better products. Better products drive faster adoption, more revenue and more cashflow.
FTX had a "flywheel". It fell off. Being saddled with hundreds of billions of debt makes this situation ten times worse.
They have pieces from paper of folks saying they may put up funds or goods and services in that amount. But it’s important to remember that:
1. While they are “raising” commitments others are backing out of deals (see Disney, various data center things). Big deals announced to major fanfare are falling through.
2. They slashed capital expenditure for the future after previously boasting about all the commitments. This is turning into bonkers math of X + Y - X + Z + W - 1/2 of Y = ? On trying to keep track of what’s actually “raised / real” vs what was PR puffery that folks ran away from later.
3. Circular financing still seems to be going on. Big difference of here’s cash, have fun and various “commitments” and balance sheet games that seem to still be going on.
Net net this all still looks very scary and iffy at best.
I am very much onboard with AI within my workflow. I just don't really see a future where openai/anthropic are the absolute front runners for devs though. Maybe OpenAI does just have the better vision by targeting the general public instead, and just competing to become the next google before google can just stay google?
What is their next step to ensure local models never overtake them? If i could use opus 4.6 as a local model isntead and wrap it in someone else's cli tool, i 100% do it today. are the future model's gonna be so far beyond in capability that this sounds foolish? the top models are more than enough to keep up with my own features before i can think of more... so how do they stretch further than that?
A side note i keep thinking about, how impossible is a world where open source base models are collectively trained similar to a proof of work style pool, and then smaller companies simply spin off their own finishing touches or whatever based on that base model? am i thinking of thinks too simplistically? is this not a possibility?
The exchanges are bending head over heels to accommodate these IPOs[1] and make our retirement index funds the exit-liquidity strategy to the thievery of pump and dump actors that buy it low and then sell high? As i understand the way thievery works is:
1. List at many multiples of market valuation on an exchange. So if you company is just 10 billion$ nasdaq and theives collude and say "can make it 100 billion..".
2. Lots of institutional investors and rich billionaires get stock options.
3. All market weighted index funds — aka all *your* low expense ratio ETF money — have to re-balance and buy them, raising their value: the exit-liquidity event
4. Rich A**** get richer by making an profit by selling higher.
[1] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/03/31/index-providers...
unless you're a private investors in these preIPO, the whole plan is to get big enough, get forced entry into indexes, and leave early with everyone else holding the bag.
That would mean the only way to increase growth would be to charge more per token and to get the existing people to use more tokens. Both of which seem to be only what mature companies do when trying to squeeze the cash cow for all it's worth.
It also explains why they're trying to stuff AI into everything, to keep the numbers up, and to get everyone to try and pay them money.
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The only way they can manage this type of monetization is a lot of compute to process outputs.