OpenAI Accuses Anthropic of Inflating Revenue by $8B

IPO Stakes: Both companies are preparing to go public in 2026, making the revenue accounting dispute central to their competing valuation narratives.

OpenAI's chief revenue officer has accused rival Anthropic of inflating its revenue in a four-page internal memo that lays out a battle plan for winning the enterprise AI market. Denise Dresser, who assumed Brad Lightcap's duties after the former COO moved to special projects, sent the memo to all employees on April 13, singling out Anthropic as OpenAI's primary competitor and questioning the accounting behind its rival's headline financial figures. Dresser was appointed CRO in December 2025 following a career leading Slack, and her expanded role now encompasses business-side responsibilities alongside CSO Jason Kwon and CFO Sarah Friar while COO Fidji Simo is on leave.

Both companies are preparing to go public in 2026. Anthropic's disclosed run rate of $30 billion now exceeds OpenAI's roughly $24 billion in annualized revenue.

As a result, the revenue gap makes the accounting dispute a high-stakes contest over which company can claim AI market leadership heading into public markets, with OpenAI allocating IPO shares to retail investors as it prepares for its debut.

At the center of the memo is a direct challenge to Anthropic's financial disclosures. Dresser claims Anthropic inflates its revenue by grossing up revenue share payments from Amazon and Google, rather than reporting them net of those partnerships, overstating the run rate by roughly $8 billion. OpenAI, by contrast, reports its Microsoft revenue share net, which Dresser argues is more consistent with the accounting standards both companies would face as publicly traded entities.

"Their stated run rate is inflated. They use accounting treatment that makes revenue look bigger than it is, including grossing up rev share with Amazon and Google. [OpenAI's] analysis shows that this overstates their run rate by roughly $8 billion (at the current $30 stated). We report Microsoft revshare net, which is more inline with standards we would be held to as a public company."

However, no independent verification of either company's accounting claims exists, and Anthropic has not publicly responded to the memo's allegations. According to prior Anthropic disclosures, the company achieved approximately $9 billion in revenue in 2025 and had projected $20 to $26 billion by the end of 2026, a target it has already surpassed. Whether Dresser's figure represents genuine accounting inflation or a competitive framing exercise remains an open question ahead of both IPOs.

Based on the memo's own figures, subtracting $8 billion from Anthropic's stated run rate would place net revenue closer to $22 billion, roughly in line with OpenAI rather than ahead of it. Without audited financials from either company, the dispute amounts to dueling internal estimates ahead of what could be two of the largest technology IPOs in history.

Moreover, revenue figures are central to the valuation narratives both companies are building for investors, and gross versus net reporting is a well-known area of accounting judgment in the cloud industry.

Beyond the revenue attack, Dresser's memo outlines five customer-backed priorities for Q2: winning the model layer for work, winning the agent platform layer, expanding through Amazon, selling the full AI-native stack, and owning deployment. An enterprise agent platform strategy anchored by internal products codenamed "Frontier" and "DeployCo" forms the core of the plan.

Building on this vision, employees are urged to adopt a platform mindset with integrated enterprise offerings rather than treating products as separate lines. OpenAI's stack now includes ChatGPT for Work as the knowledge work entry point, Codex for software development, the API for embedded intelligence, Frontier as the agent platform, and Amazon Stateful Runtime for production-grade execution.

Built on a landmark AWS cloud deal announced in late February, the Amazon runtime enables memory and continuity across interactions, moving beyond stateless model access toward systems that can operate reliably across complex business processes. Pairing the runtime with DeployCo, which the memo describes as helping companies prove value faster, reduce risk, and scale adoption, gives OpenAI a deployment story that goes beyond API access.

Furthermore, a "Frontier Alliance" partner model would scale deployment execution across the market.

Internally, the memo touts a model codenamed "Spud" as OpenAI's smartest yet, emphasizing stronger reasoning, better understanding of intent, and more reliable output for enterprise customers. Multi-year, nine-figure enterprise deals are rising, according to the memo, with existing customers expanding and standardizing on OpenAI capabilities across their organizations. Enterprise already accounts for about 40% of OpenAI's revenue, and the memo confirms that enterprise will equal consumer revenue by the end of 2026.

In practice, for enterprise customers already using ChatGPT for Work, adding Codex, Frontier, and the stateful runtime creates switching costs that grow with each additional product adopted. OpenAI can retain customers even if Anthropic's Claude models outperform on individual benchmarks, shifting the competitive axis from model quality to ecosystem depth.

Dresser's sharpest language targets Anthropic's technical and philosophical positioning. "Their strategic misstep to not acquire enough compute is showing up in the product," the memo states, citing throttling, weaker availability, and less reliable customer experience as symptoms of a deeper infrastructure deficit. She described these as consequences of a failure to secure adequate compute capacity when it was available, arguing that the shortfall now constrains product quality for enterprise customers.

In addition, she attacked Anthropic's safety-first branding, writing that Anthropic's narrative is "built on fear, restriction" and elite control of AI. She acknowledged Anthropic's strength in coding as an initial competitive advantage but characterized the company as vulnerable in a broader platform competition, arguing that a single-product focus cannot sustain an enterprise war.

Yet Anthropic's disclosed infrastructure plans complicate that compute critique. Anthropic signed a long-term deal with Google and Broadcom for 3.5 gigawatts of TPU compute capacity starting in 2027, according to a Broadcom SEC filing cited by The Register.

Separately, Anthropic now counts over 1,000 enterprise customers each spending more than $1 million annually, doubling from 500 in February 2026. Meanwhile, Claude remains the only frontier AI model available on all three major cloud platforms, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, and Microsoft Azure Foundry, giving Anthropic a distribution advantage that Dresser's memo does not address. Rather than suffering from a compute shortage, Anthropic appears to be scaling infrastructure and enterprise relationships simultaneously.

Dresser's memo extends a pattern of OpenAI leadership publicly disparaging its rival. CEO Sam Altman wrote in February that Anthropic "serves an expensive product to rich people." Escalation from consumer-focused mockery to a formal enterprise battle plan suggests OpenAI views Anthropic's rapid growth, from $1 billion in revenue in 2024 to its current run rate, as a serious organizational threat.

Consequently, OpenAI's own consumer market share has eroded sharply over the past two years as Anthropic has gained ground among enterprise buyers, adding urgency to the enterprise pivot that the memo outlines.

Inbound demand from the Amazon partnership has been "frankly staggering," according to the memo. With both companies heading toward IPOs, Dresser identified OpenAI's constraint as internal capacity rather than demand.

She argued that "multi-product adoption makes us harder to replace," framing platform lock-in as the competitive moat that separates OpenAI from a rival she cast as a single-product company in a platform war. Whether that framing holds may depend less on the accounting dispute and more on whether enterprise customers value integrated platforms over top-performing point solutions, a question that will be tested as both companies open their books to public investors.