Leaks about OpenAI and other private AI companies’ revenue may affect public markets

On a podcast, participants discussed conflicting reports about OpenAI revenue: one leak put it at nearly $70 billion, while another report published the same day put it at nearly $50 billion. They said private-company figures are difficult to verify: in their view, information passes through investors and limited partners before being relayed to the press. They cited differing accounting for sales through cloud platforms as one possible reason the figures are not comparable. In the example given, OpenAI counts a sale of its model through AWS as revenue, while Anthropic counts part of its payment to Amazon as an expense. The participants said an attempt to make the figures comparable could change the reported total, but considered the adjustment unclear and possibly done sloppily.

The participants also discussed how revenue information about OpenAI and Anthropic could affect public companies viewed as market proxies, including SpaceX, Oracle, and SoftBank. In their view, information about private companies of this scale can influence markets more than news about most private firms. Private companies are not required to report on a regular schedule, although the participants said their metrics matter to public markets. One participant suggested regular updates—for example, quarterly reports or daily media coverage.

The participants described how a false rumor of high revenue could prompt investors to buy related shares, allowing the rumor’s source to profit from a subsequent decline by taking a short position before actual results are released. One participant explicitly called such a scheme securities fraud and said not to do it. He said manipulating public stocks using private-company information had not previously been viable at significant scale. As an example, he cited a 2008 case: the SEC sued trader Paul Berliner, who the agency alleged fabricated a Blackstone acquisition rumor while shorting the target stock; after media outlets picked it up, the stock briefly fell 17%. Berliner settled SEC fraud and market-manipulation charges. The participant also mentioned prosecutors’ allegations that the founder of Citron Research used influential public commentary in a securities-fraud scheme while misleading investors about his trading intentions.

Discussing IPOs, one participant said going public is aligned with better corporate governance and distributing gains. He cited the possibility of including AI labs’ shares in retirement and investment portfolios, and argued that, in an optimistic scenario, public markets could distribute gains more broadly than a small group of insiders. He also mentioned controversy over including SpaceX in retirement portfolios and noted that a company’s weight in indexes can limit the risk of one stock overwhelming a portfolio.