Anthropic's third-quarter revenue was $16.8 billion, and OpenAI's annualized revenue was nearly $50 billion, both falling short of market expectations

[[**Anthropic's third-quarter revenue was $16.8 billion, up 46% quarter-over-quarter, but growth has clearly slowed compared with the first half; OpenAI's annualized revenue was reported at nearly $50 billion, below market expectations of $70 billion. Revenue at leading model companies falling short of expectations has triggered a valuation pullback across the AI industry chain, and AI trading has entered a financial verification phase.**

**Key points**

**1. Anthropic's revenue growth is slowing**

Third-quarter revenue was $16.8 billion, up 46% quarter-over-quarter, below the over-100% growth in the first half; annualized revenue is about $74 billion, short of some investors' expectations of more than $100 billion by year-end, and the company voluntarily restricted distillation-related revenue.

**2. OpenAI's revenue is below expectations and there are differences in accounting**

Annualized revenue as of the end of September was close to $50 billion, $20 billion less than the previously adjusted market expectation of $70 billion, with the gap mainly due to different revenue recognition methods; on the day the news was announced, Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom all fell.

**3. AI assets adjusted simultaneously from US stocks to A-shares**

On October 14, US computing infrastructure companies fell sharply, compounded by rate-hike concerns triggered by CPI coming in above expectations; the A-share STAR 50 fell 3.29% that day, and the market began to reassess valuation standards for the AI industry chain.

**4. The AI narrative has entered a financial verification phase**

Anthropic's adjusted operating margin was 11%, but it has committed to more than $518 billion in spending over the next decade, and its profitability may change; investors' focus is shifting from capital expenditure plans to actual revenue, profit and cash flow, and Anthropic's IPO will test valuation expectations. 2026-10-15 11:25 AI trading, growth begins to fall short of expectations Bright Company Quick Look

This article is from the WeChat public account: Bright Company, author: Editor-in-Chief Online 24 Hours, original title: "AI Trading, Growth Begins to Fall Short of Expectations | Valuation Narrative 28"

On October 14, according to FT, Anthropic disclosed some financial figures to IPO investors. The company's third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion, up about 46% quarter-over-quarter, achieving adjusted profitability for the second consecutive quarter.

Although the growth rate appears high, Anthropic's revenue growth has in fact clearly slowed. In the first quarter of this year, the company's revenue was about $4.8 billion, rising to $11.5 billion in the second quarter, more than doubling quarter-over-quarter. The quarter-over-quarter growth rate in the third quarter fell back below 50%.

Research firm SemiAnalysis estimates based on the latest quarterly data that Anthropic's current annualized revenue is about $74 billion. Previously, some investors had expected the company's annualized revenue to far exceed $100 billion by the end of the year.

However, Reuters, citing investors who attended the meeting, said Anthropic still expects annualized revenue to reach $110 billion by the end of the year.

Six days earlier, OpenAI also disclosed a revenue figure that was "below previous market expectations."

On October 8, FT, citing financial documents obtained by investors, reported that as of the end of September, OpenAI's annualized revenue was close to $50 billion, about $20 billion less than the $70 billion widely circulated in the market.

On the day the news was announced, Nvidia fell 2.9%, AMD fell 3.9%, and Broadcom fell 4.3%. As of October 14, the Chinese market had also adjusted, with the STAR 50 index falling 3.29% on the 14th.

The situation the capital market feared most has arrived: revenue at leading AI companies is falling short of expectations. Valuations of industry-chain companies that had previously benefited from capital expenditure have begun to pull back, and, from model companies to upstream chip suppliers, the market has begun to reassess the sustainability of revenue growth and capital expenditure across the AI industry chain as well as valuation standards.

As of publication on the 15th, the STAR 50 index was down 2.9%.

Anthropic's latest financial figures show growth below expectations

In the first half of this year, the market expectation for Anthropic was that its IPO valuation could set a listing record; its previous valuation was $965 billion, and related information said the company had planned to list in November and seek a higher valuation.

Before listing, Anthropic showed investors the scale of commercialization it had already achieved. In addition to third-quarter revenue of $16.8 billion, the company also disclosed profitability metrics.

According to FT, Anthropic has achieved positive cash flow, with an adjusted operating margin of 11% in the third quarter. "For every $1 of computing resource cost invested, the company can generate $1.70 of revenue." This means Anthropic's model service revenue can already cover the corresponding computing resource costs and achieve operating profit on an adjusted basis. However, these figures do not yet reflect full capital expenditure and all accounting costs.

For Anthropic, whose valuation is close to $1 trillion, the market's focus has shifted to future growth.

In the first half of this year, Claude's competitiveness in areas such as programming helped Anthropic rapidly expand its enterprise customer base. But entering the second half, the company's revenue growth began to be affected by competition.

In July this year, OpenAI launched a new model, re-strengthening its competitiveness in some application scenarios. At the same time, Anthropic's important customers Meta and Microsoft began to use more self-developed AI tools, and domestic open-source model vendors are also competing for the market through low prices.

SemiAnalysis analyst Joey Brookhart said that over the past three months, investors have been revising down Anthropic's annualized revenue expectations. In the first half of this year, Anthropic maintained a lead in some markets, but now OpenAI has once again become its main competitor.

In addition, Anthropic has also proactively curtailed part of its revenue sources. Anthropic told investors that model distillation-related revenue accounts for 5% to 7% of total revenue, and the company significantly restricted such usage in the third quarter. Model distillation here refers to other model developers using outputs generated by advanced models to train their own models. Because this requires large numbers of API calls, such activity previously contributed revenue to Anthropic.

But the company's long-term capital expenditure plans remain enormous. According to Reuters, Anthropic's committed spending on cloud services, computing resources and infrastructure over the next decade exceeds $518 billion.

It is worth noting that Anthropic's management also reminded investors that as the company continues to invest in computing power and biomedical research, its current profitability may change. Based on a $965 billion valuation and the $74 billion annualized revenue estimated by SemiAnalysis, Anthropic's valuation is about 13 times its annualized revenue.

OpenAI's revenue has also "fallen short of expectations"

Compared with Anthropic, the controversy triggered by OpenAI's latest financial data centers on how revenue is counted.

On October 8, according to the FT, OpenAI disclosed to investors that as of the end of September, the company's annualized revenue was close to $50 billion. But the market had widely estimated that OpenAI's annualized revenue was close to $70 billion—in other words, this too was "below expectations."

The $20 billion gap between the two figures comes from the different revenue recognition methods used by OpenAI and Anthropic. Anthropic counts sales revenue realized through cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud as its own revenue. OpenAI does not use exactly the same treatment. Previously, investors adjusted OpenAI's revenue figures to compare the two companies, producing the $70 billion market expectation.

From this perspective, the change in revenue data may not mean that OpenAI suddenly lost $20 billion in revenue. The revenue the company disclosed to investors is still growing, with an increase of more than 70%.

But the capital market's reaction to this news was fairly direct.

On October 8, major chip stocks such as Nvidia (NVDA.US), AMD (AMD.US) and Broadcom (AVGO.US) fell collectively. The Nasdaq index fell about 1.3% that day, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index dropped more than 3%.

This reaction is related to OpenAI's position in the AI industry chain. Over the past few years, OpenAI has been an important driver of growth in global AI computing demand—the company's continuously expanding financing scale, computing procurement agreements and data center construction plans have provided order expectations for upstream chip suppliers. At the same time, the financial data of model companies themselves has long lacked the complete disclosure required by public markets. Investors have mostly inferred the companies' growth potential from annualized revenue, user numbers and capital expenditure plans.

When a $20 billion difference appears in revenue accounting, the market begins to re-examine the basis for these inferences. This has also made OpenAI's future capital expenditure a key focus for investors.

Moreover, model training and inference require continuous procurement of computing resources. OpenAI likewise has to face falling model prices and competition from Anthropic, domestic open-source models and self-developed models from large technology companies.

On October 13, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell for a fifth consecutive trading day. On the 15th, Micron Technology (MU.US) fell 4.5%, storage-related companies SanDisk (SNDK.US) fell 4.3%, Seagate Technology (STX.US) fell 5.9%, and Western Digital (WDC.US) fell 5.8%.

In addition to changes in AI capital expenditure expectations, technological progress in storage by Chinese memory chip maker ChangXin Technology (688825.SH) also triggered market concerns about intensifying competition in global memory chips.

On October 14, the US reported that September CPI rose 3.7% year on year, higher than market expectations. The inflation data increased market concerns about further Federal Reserve rate hikes. That day, the Nasdaq index fell 1.88% and the S&P 500 index fell 1.11%.

However, AI infrastructure companies fell even more. CoreWeave (CRWV.US) fell about 16%, Nebius (NBIS.US) fell about 11%, Oracle (ORCL.US) fell about 9%, and Dell Technologies (DELL.US) fell about 11%. According to Reuters statistics, the four companies lost a combined market value of about $80 billion. These companies' businesses depend on large-scale computing infrastructure construction. Rising interest rates will directly increase financing costs and also depress the investment returns of some projects. CoreWeave's bond prices have already reflected this pressure. On October 14, the yield on some of its bonds rose to around 15%, as investors demanded higher risk compensation.

The Chinese market also experienced adjustments.

On October 14, the STAR 50 Index fell 3.29%; the STAR Composite Index fell 2.97%. Of the 617 stocks trading normally on the STAR Market, only 58 rose. Domestic AI chip companies also benefit from domestic substitution, and the drivers of their business growth differ from those of US chip companies. But for some time, the valuations of these companies have likewise been driven by expectations of growth in AI computing demand.

As global AI assets adjust, the A-share technology sector has also begun to come under pressure on valuations and liquidity.

Model companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic obtain funds through financing and invest them in GPUs, data centers and cloud computing services. Nvidia, server, storage and data center companies then receive orders through these investments.

The capital expenditure plans of model companies have thus become an important basis for the market to forecast upstream companies' revenue.

But this growth relationship has a precondition: model companies must ultimately bear increasingly high computing costs through commercial revenue.

The latest financial data disclosed by Anthropic and OpenAI are beginning to make this issue more concrete. Anthropic has already achieved relatively high revenue and adjusted profitability, but its growth rate is lower than before. OpenAI is still growing rapidly, but its latest revenue accounting differs from previous market expectations. Both companies still need to continue investing in computing resources to maintain model competitiveness.

At the same time, price competition among models is intensifying. Progress in customers' self-developed models and open-source models has also begun to affect the revenue growth of leading model companies.

These changes have made it harder for the market to judge the long-term profitability of model companies. For upstream computing companies, order growth still has support, but valuations need to take into account customers' return on capital. As interest rates rise, companies that rely on external financing to build data centers also have to bear higher funding costs.

In the past, when model companies announced larger financing and computing procurement plans, that alone could push up upstream companies' valuations. Now, investors are beginning to focus on model companies' actual revenue, profits and cash flow, and to judge the sustainability of capital expenditure on that basis.

Before long, Anthropic's IPO will further test the market's valuation expectations for leading model companies, and this will also affect the valuations of listed and soon-to-be-listed large-model companies in China.

The AI trade has entered a phase of financial verification. Model capabilities, capital expenditure and computing orders remain important, but revenue growth and return on capital will carry greater weight. The financial performance of Anthropic and OpenAI shows that the AI industry has already generated considerable commercial revenue. But this revenue still needs to support hundreds of billions of dollars in future computing resource investment.

The multi-year narrative of AI capital expenditure is now facing new constraints. Channel: Finance and Economics. This content comes from the internet; original link. The views represent only the author and do not represent Huxiu's position. For copyright issues, please contact hezuo@huxiu.com, and we will verify and handle them promptly. Everyone who is changing the world and wants to change the world is on the Huxiu APP[ ]