According to Readhub, a four-page internal memo from Denice Drescher, Chief Revenue Officer of OpenAI, has been leaked. The letter strongly questions the recently released revenue data of competitor Anthropic, claiming it is severely "inflated," and accuses its products of not being able to support platform-level competition.

Core Dispute: The Financial Trick Behind 30 Billion

A week ago, Anthropic announced its annualized revenue reached 30 billion dollars, surpassing OpenAI in one move. However, this memo pointed out the "water" in the numbers:

  • Statistical Differences: OpenAI accuses Anthropic of using the "gross method" to handle revenue sharing with cloud service providers, inflating its revenue by 8 billion dollars.

  • True Ranking: If calculated using the "net method" commonly used by public companies, Anthropic's true annualized revenue is approximately 22 billion dollars, which did not exceed OpenAI's 25 billion dollars.

  • Compute Bottleneck: The memo reveals that Anthropic has failed to obtain enough compute power, leading to an unsatisfactory user experience for its flagship model Claude in real-world applications.

Strategic Battle: Programming Tool vs. Enterprise All-in-One System

Aside from financial doubts, OpenAI also launched a low-level attack on their development paths:

  1. Product Specialization: It criticized Anthropic for focusing too much on programming scenarios, although the technology is deep, it is difficult to win the comprehensive "platform war".

  2. System Building: OpenAI claims it is building a complete enterprise AI system, dedicated to "democratizing AI", rather than a single tool.

  3. Talent Acquisition: On the same day, OpenAI announced the acquisition of AI financial application company Hiro Finance. This move is seen as a targeted "learning", enhancing its perception in life and professional scenarios by absorbing financial talent to counter Anthropic's vertical penetration.

Industry Perspective: Anxiety Behind an 85.2 Billion Dollar Valuation

Beneath this "mutual attack," there is caution from the capital market about the AI bubble:

  • Valuation Discount: Although OpenAI's valuation has reached 85.2 billion dollars, investors are increasing their doubts about its strategic shift and revenue authenticity.

  • Market Trends: In contrast, Anthropic's shares have been snapped up in the secondary market, while OpenAI's shares have faced an awkward situation of being ignored, which may be the deeper reason behind the aggressive tone of this internal letter.

Conclusion: The Model Crisis Behind the Data Competition

When OpenAI chooses to expose internal letters to undermine its competitor's credit, it reflects that the AI competition has entered a brutal stage. For users, compared to who has higher annualized revenue, what they care more about is: in the current era of compute shortages, who can first create a true AGI that does not sacrifice intelligence or inflate data.