YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Obviously not the same thing as lying, but Anthropic had also been juicing the revenues with making smart models incredibly verbose. In August my org 3x more in API credits vs July. In September the spend returned to July levels partially because they made models less verbose, but mostly because we've changed how we are using them.

> Apparently they overstated revenue in an attempt to try to provide a direct comparison with Anthropic's reported metrics.

Just to clarify from my understanding of the quote, "they" here is openai investors, not openai.

All that tells you is that they haven't at all abandoned the disinformation: Now they are blaming Anthropic for it and trying to shift attention to them.

You can still learn something from it: Look at what they do, not what they say - look at how sophisticated their public communication is. They deliver that information in the perfect manner - not only the redirection and striking a blow against their rival, but they use an anonymous "person with knowledge of the matter": A named source at OpenAI might betray the self-interest in the statement, but some anonymous third party is just reporting what they know.

These guys are very good at it, though that shouldn't surprise you. Look at their product, in one sense a highly effective disinformation machine.

> Apparently they overstated revenue in an attempt to try to provide a direct comparison with Anthropic's reported metrics.

I'm confident both companies are lying about their revenues.

The link doesn't work.

>The pair calculate the figure in different ways, with Anthropic including the revenue from sales via cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI does not.

gift link didn't work for me, and is this poorly phrased? because it seems implausible that OpenAI doesn't typically include revenue from their models being used on AWS. Perhaps the "gross up" is referring to how the number is included? like Anthropic was using the value pre-removal of revenue sharing and putting the revenue share subtraction as a separate expense?

[not a finance guy so someone tell me I'm wrong if that's not a plausible reading]

Not a good day for the entire Nasdaq thanks to Scam A and his magic numbers.

the models are extremely dumb today too, sol 6.1 in particular

It is rarely a challenge to turn $100 into $50.

Nvidia’s revenue is more than that per quarter, the demand for AI workloads is through the roof.

Yeah, take your most profitable day/week/month and multiple it by 365/52/12.

yeah because every startup that does this is asking for 2trillion dollar evaluation, lol lmao even

When the dust settles, I reckon OAI will make FTX's losses look like chump change

How much money do they have left? It is hard for me to see how OpenAI doesn't fail at this point. There is no business, no moat. Honestly, the best outcome seems like failing up into a Microsoft acquisition at this point.

> zero information on how it’s doing

I think the fact that we have so little information is the most important information we have. If OpenAI had a sound business plan and was on strong financial footing, they'd have IPO'd.

All of this continued stalling and obfuscation can only mean one thing, IMO: OpenAI has no long-term viability and they're desperately hoping for some new breakthrough to reinvent their business model before the VC money faucets turn off for good.

Nobody is quiet about doing well. And the frenetic release schedule of kinda half baked products tells a story (not a good one)

it really is a privatize the gains socialize the losses situation, isn't it? due to the new rules (or lack thereof), public investors didn't have access to all that growth.

no way it ever gives you a return like, say, the amazon IPO could've.

What regulation makes it so that a large private company would have to go public? You have it backwards. Increased regulations make it more burdensome for a company to go public, driving companies like OpenAI to remain private. If you made it less expensive and burdensome to IPO (decreased regulation), you would see companies go IPO earlier.

This also coincides with a growing market for private credit and VC which certainly helps companies stay private for longer.

They would go public if they were doing well.

> This is an interesting shift compared to the past where OpenAI would’ve been public a long time ago (due to various regulations) so we would have much more direct insight.

There's a good recent YouTube video about the shift in regulations that switched IPOs from being a way to raise money for growth to being a way to dump on retail investors after all the significant growth has been funded by private investors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roe3SgezmmU

There are bits and pieces of info scattered everywhere but no coherent picture. We know from a16z report [1] that only 2% of US households pay for AI subscriptions, so most of the seat based pricing comes from business and enterprise agreements. We know that OpenAI ads business has $1 billion USD in annualised revenue run rate [2]. We know from OpenRouter data [3] that in 2025 70% of the API token spend was across all the proprietary models (Anthropic did very well in 2025, while OpenAI clawed back market share in 2026).

It all starts to look like a very low margins business, and reminds me very much of telecom industry.

[1] https://www.a16z.news/p/state-of-markets-ii

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/openais-ad-bu...

[3] https://openrouter.ai/state-of-ai

>Right now we have a ~$1 trillion company which a ton of the “economy” and valuations are based on, with near zero information on how it’s doing.

This is definitely by design and encouraged by the VC’s. It’s disgusting to consider what a simulacrum of a market the stock market has actually become.

It’s because this IPO is backed by those who grew up through the boom and bust of the dotcom era, so they know now to do all their growth in secret behind the scenes and then dump onto the market when there’s nothing more in that tank. Rather than letting the public have any major growth out of their baby, and only letting the price discovery phase work one way.

The annualized their revenue based on a single day! So yes, total bullshit.

And the sad fact is even though they did this, they were still 20 billion too low.

Not only will this never be an IPO, this is a signal of a collapse of the economy

Zitron complained about a lot of things, one some he was wrong (eg. llm are not useful), on others(eg. "magic accounting" or datacenters ) he has very good points ... but we will see.

This is pretty much the main point of his frustration.

The world has standardised methods of accounting. Not only do Anthropic and OpenAI avoid using those methods, they both use the same phrase “annualised revenues” to describe two radically different accounting processes.

They’re both also leaking those annualised numbers slowly to the press at irregular intervals, which hints that they’re disclosing new numbers in the days after a big sale lands. So you see “$30bn annualised” because they managed to land a $1bn contract the week before, bumping the annualised figure up by $12bn compared to the start of the previous month, and the end of the next.

No. You should read the article

> based on information that was provided to investors.

It was OpenAI spreading their bullshit annualized revenue.

OpenAI and Anthropic always play this silly game to pretend they are in anyway viable. It is always ARR, "adjusted" revenue, etc. "We are profitable when we pretend we don't have expenses".

Exactly.

  > far short of the $70bn reported by the FT and other media outlets late last month based on information that was provided to investors.

Media was mislead by second hand information and misled the public, now they are 'shocked' they reported incorrectly..

Still, seems it is still true that their number is not directly comparable to Anthropic's because they calculate it differently, I think that part still stands and is pretty relevant here.

Sorry Bence I trust the FT journalists to have due diligence w.r.t. what evidence of AR they got from investors (who got it from OpenAI). I completely believe that the company helmed by "not consistently candid" sama bullshits investors about their AR which is the point of this article.

Though I agree with your sentiment that FT is reporting this stuff in a way to stir the pot and create outrage. Speculating about a private company like this is stupid.

judging from SpaceX performance, I think the market can handle a couple more low float high valuation issuances

The public markets have floated multiple names up to $6tr marketcap/valuation

so the debuts at $1tr valuation from the private markets don’t mean anything

pre-IPO investors will just collar like they did SpaceX, nullifying any price volatility for them at the high share price, and giving them all the liquidity collateral they need for borrowing