The Fallout From OpenAI’s Revenue Surprise
News that the artificial intelligence giant’s sales weren’t growing as fast as investors had expected added to concerns about the A.I. boom.
Andrew here. Nobody likes to talk about deficits, but we can’t afford to ignore them. The federal budget deficit climbed to nearly $2 trillion in the most recent fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office said on Thursday. The problem isn’t just that we’re spending far more than we’re taking in. It’s that the gap is growing.
For the tax nerds among us, Yale’s Budget Lab has a fascinating new tool that lets you build your own tax package, testing how much revenue different proposals would actually raise — and how they interact with one another as taxpayers change their behavior. It’s a useful reminder that even the seemingly simple answer of taxing the wealthy is complicated.
Questions about A.I. revenue and safety
The biggest artificial intelligence companies have justified their rapidly increasing valuations with revenue projections that keep climbing quickly.
But the revelation on Thursday that a crucial OpenAI revenue metric had merely doubled in the last quarter battered shares of companies exposed to the sector.
It’s a fresh challenge facing the artificial intelligence industry, adding to concerns like safety, Sri Muppidi reports.
The latest: OpenAI’s annualized revenue, a measure favored by start-ups to demonstrate revenue momentum, was about $50 billion at the end of last month, up from roughly $28 billion at the end of June, an OpenAI spokesperson told DealBook.
That’s significantly lower than the $70 billion figure given to investors last month. That was not accurate, according to the OpenAI spokesperson. (The Financial Times first reported details of the discrepancy.)
The revision tanked A.I. stocks. Shares in Nvidia, Oracle and Microsoft sank on Thursday’s news.
This highlights the interconnectedness — and the potential fragility — of the A.I. boom, much of whose fortune rides on the continued success of OpenAI and Anthropic.
It also underscores the risks posed by basing investment decisions on pro forma revenue measures. Investors are increasingly turning to data from companies like the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower and the billing platform Ramp to help calculate their own financial models.
But those efforts could also lead to large discrepancies between public perception and actual reality.
And then there are the safety questions. Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher who has since accused leading labs of not taking safety seriously enough, has ignited a new debate about the industry.
He’s “90 percent” certain that China has spies inside Anthropic and OpenAI, he said recently on the PBD Podcast.
His claim comes amid the intense A.I. rivalry between the U.S. and China. Remember that President Trump has dismissed calls to more tightly regulate American A.I. companies, urging them to innovate faster to stay ahead of Chinese rivals.
Anthropic and OpenAI are likely to push back on Coxon’s claims.
Anthropic closely scrutinizes its personnel, restricts access to important technologies and monitors suspicious activity by employees, according to a person with knowledge of the company who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly. Anthropic doesn’t think there’s evidence to support Coxon’s claim, the person added.
OpenAI revamped its security processes last summer, after claims emerged that Chinese rivals like DeepSeek were copying its models. That included stronger restrictions on employee access to new models and products and fingerprint access to sensitive office areas. The company also vets workers across their entire tenure, from when they apply for a job to when they leave, according to a person with knowledge of the protocols who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.