The Information's TITV · Oct 9, 2026 · 47m · 36m saved
With Jing Yang, Asia Bureau Chief at The Information · Stephanie Palazzolo, Reporter at The Information · Anastasios Angelopoulos, Co-Founder and CEO of Arena · Uljan Sharka, Founder and CEO of Domyn
OpenAI told investors it was approaching $50 billion in annualized revenue at the end of September — $20 billion below the $70 billion figure that had circulated a month earlier.
Both numbers came from OpenAI. The gap isn't a lie or a restatement — it's two different, equally defensible ways of counting the same cloud-reselling revenue, and nobody flagged which one was which until an FT report forced the comparison.
"It's, you know, not common for you to suddenly see 20 billion dollars' worth of revenue disappear from a number."
Stephanie Palazzolo, who writes The Information's AI Agenda newsletter, breaks down the accounting behind that figure with host Akash Pasricha. The show also covers China's AI model race getting more crowded, Arena's $200 million raise and new safety index with CEO Anastasios Angelopoulos, and Domyn's sovereign-AI pitch with CEO Uljan Sharka.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 47 minutes of audio, 11 minutes of reading.
Here are the 8 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
OpenAI told investors it was approaching $50 billion in annualized revenue, $20 billion below the $70 billion figure reported a month earlier, Palazzolo said
The gap traces to whether cloud-reseller revenue is counted gross (Anthropic's method) or net (OpenAI's), not to a restatement
OpenAI never disputed the earlier $70 billion figure, Palazzolo said — the number was an investor estimate of what OpenAI's revenue would look like under Anthropic's accounting method
Three more Chinese tech giants — Meituan, Xiaomi and miHoYo — are now building their own large language models, on top of DeepSeek, Moonshot and Zhipu
Acquisitions are rare in China's AI race because incumbents compete with each other outside AI too, Jing Yang said, which breeds distrust that blocks M&A
Arena raised $200 million at a $3.1 billion valuation and launched an "Alignment Index" that found a "shocking number" of AI misalignment violations in everyday use
AMD paid $8 billion for World Labs because it had no existing team of scientists to build one, Jing Yang said, contrasting it with why Chinese AI labs rarely get bought
Domyn says it will do $1 billion in revenue this year selling a subscription to use open, client-owned AI models rather than selling tokens
Domyn gives clients the model weights, data sets and training recipes, under what it calls an "AI ownership" license, so a client can keep training the model without Domyn's involvement
1. OpenAI's $20B Gap
OpenAI told investors it was approaching $50 billion in annualized revenue at the end of September — $20 billion below a $70 billion figure reported a month earlier
"Essentially OpenAI had been recently telling investors that it was approaching $50 billion in annualized revenue at the end of September. You know, on its own, $50 billion is a great number, but the issue here is that that figure is $20 billion lower than another figure that was being reported last month by us and others. And that figure was that the company was approaching $70 billion in ARR." — Stephanie Palazzolo
OpenAI never disputed the $70 billion figure, which Palazzolo says makes the gap more interesting, not less
"I also just do want to say that OpenAI never disputed the $70 billion figure that had come out last month, which is important to say, I think." — Stephanie Palazzolo
