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Perspective
Foundation ModelsVenture & Startup Markets

OpenAI Revenue Revised Down by $20 Billion

October 10, 2026|1 min

A perspective from Contrary Research.

Dot-grid line chart: one rising line forks, the blue branch breaking off below the grey
  • Perspective
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Multiple reports this week raised questions about how much revenue OpenAI models really bring in, and how much those models cost the company to run. The Financial Times reported that OpenAI’s annualized revenue is approaching $50 billion, about $20 billion below the $70 billion figure widely reported in late September. OpenAI investors reportedly generated the gap by adjusting the company’s revenue figures to match how Anthropic counts revenue (Anthropic includes sales made through cloud partners such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, while OpenAI does not). US tech stocks fell after the report, with the Nasdaq 100 down 1.7%, and shares of Nvidia, Oracle, and Micron down 3% to 6%.

Separately, observers have claimed that GPT-6.1 Sol, OpenAI’s newest mid-tier model, is actually a more efficient version of GPT-6 Sol rather than an entirely new model. The thread cited a Microsoft Azure page suggesting that the model reuses GPT-6 Sol’s weights but works through each request in two inference passes instead of three, using less compute for a given query. This would explain why Sol is priced below Astra by Microsoft. Neither company has confirmed the claim, and the Microsoft page reporting the loop count has been taken down.

Authors

  • Claire Schultz

    Research Associate

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Authors

  • Claire Schultz

    Research Associate

    Claire is a Research Associate at Contrary. Claire's academic research has centered primarily on particle physics, and has been published in Nature. Prior to Contrary, Claire worked on the investment team at Bridgewater Associates and studied mathematics and physics.

    See articles

Related Companies

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  • OpenAI logo
    Foundation ModelsSecondary Market
    Foundation ModelsSecondary Market

    OpenAI

    OpenAI has become a central driver of global AI adoption, evolving from a research lab into one of the most widely used model and application providers.

    1 PerspectiveMemo
  • Anthropic logo
    Foundation ModelsSeries F
    Foundation ModelsSeries F

    Anthropic

    Anthropic has developed its own method to train and deploy “Constitutional AI”, or large language models (LLMs) with embedded values that can be controlled by humans.

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