(Sherwood News)

The AI revenue race heats up: OpenAI expecting $12.7 billion this year; Anthropic cuts deal with Databricks

Revenue projections are rosy, but companies are still burning huge piles of investor cash.

3/27/25 3:18PM

AI companies have been burning hundreds of billions of investors’ dollars to grow their businesses, trying to figure out the business model along the way. Just today, it was reported that OpenAI is finalizing a $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank with a valuation of $300 billion.

Bloomberg reports that OpenAI is expecting its revenue to triple this year to $12.7 billion. Last year, the ChatGPT maker pulled in $3.7 billion in revenue, according to the report. Recently, The New York Times reported that the company was on track to lose $5 billion in 2024. Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI.

OpenAI came to market early with its $20 per month subscription to ChatGPT, a price that doesn’t seem to match up with the operating costs for the service.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed recently that the company is losing money on its $200 per month ChatGPT Pro subscription, saying that “people use it much more than we expected.”

no, i personally chose the price and thought we would make some money
— Sam Altman (@sama) January 6, 2025

There are also paid ChatGPT plans for teams, enterprise, and education.

The Information recently reported that OpenAI was also considering charging $20,000 per month for “PhD-level agents.”

The cost of running ChatGPT services is likely to spike as all models going forward will be “reasoning” models, which take more expensive computing time to mull a problem and appear to increase the performance of the model. But it’s far from certain that the current product pricing will cover these huge costs.

Anthropic + Databricks

At least OpenAI is pulling in some serious cash. Competitor Anthropic is still playing catch-up with OpenAI and is also on a quest for revenue.

The Information reported that Anthropic is making about $115 million per month, a little more than one-third of what OpenAI is making, and the company burned $6.5 billion in cash last year.

To help juice that revenue, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Anthropic has struck a five-year, $100 million deal to sell AI services to Databricks’ business customers.

Earlier this month, Anthropic said it raised another $3.5 billion, with a valuation of $61.5 billion. Founded by former OpenAI executives, the company has raised $8 billion from Amazon and expects to grow revenue to $34.5 billion by 2027.

Jon Keegan3h

Report: US Treasury wants to get a look at Anthropic’s Mythos model

Anthropic’s relationship with the US government is complicated — and the Treasury Department is reportedly looking to make it even more so.

The Pentagon has officially deemed the startup a national security supply chain risk after it refused to allow its Claude AI to be used for any and all national security applications, including domestic surveillance and autonomous killing.

But since Anthropic’s unusual announcement of its next model, Mythos, other parts of the US government want to get their hands on it.

Bloomberg reports that the US Treasury is interested in getting access to Mythos for its own security testing. Last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent summoned top Wall Street CEOs to Washington to discuss the cybersecurity implications of the new model.

Mythos has not yet been released to the public, as Anthropic has deemed its potential offensive cybersecurity capabilities to be too dangerous for wide release, and has opted to share the powerful new model only with a group of leading tech companies.

Anthropic wants these early access partners to test out the model, hoping to secure any major vulnerabilities before a public release. OpenAI also shared a forthcoming AI-powered cybersecurity tool with a select group of partners to shore up defenses in light of advances in detecting vulnerabilities.

European regulators were apparently left out of the loop from the Mythos announcement, and are also eager to test the new model.

US Treasury Seeking Access to Anthropic’s Mythos to Find Flaws

But since Anthropic’s unusual announcement of its next model, Mythos, other parts of the US government want to get their hands on it.

European regulators were apparently left out of the loop from the Mythos announcement, and are also eager to test the new model.

Nate Becker

Quantum stocks rip as IonQ discloses new contracts, hits benchmark milestones

It’s also World Quantum Day.

Rani Molla7h

Report: SpaceX’s satellite internet business is propping up its rocket and AI businesses

Ahead of SpaceX’s highly anticipated IPO in June, new reporting from The Information reveals just how dependent the rocket and AI company is on its internet business.

According to the report, in 2025, Starlink generated $11.4 billion in revenue and $7.2 billion in adjusted EBITDA — a striking 63% margin — making it SpaceX’s only meaningful source of profit.

By contrast, the company’s core rocket launch business and its recently acquired AI unit, xAI, lagged far behind financially. The space launch business generated $4.1 billion in revenue and about $700 million in adjusted EBITDA, while the AI segment brought in $3.2 billion in revenue but lost roughly $1.2 billion on an EBITDA basis.

In other words, Starlink accounted for most of SpaceX’s revenue — and more than all of its adjusted profit.

Starlink’s profitability is already attracting rivals. Amazon on Tuesday agreed to acquire satellite company Globalstar in an effort to more directly compete with Starlink.

Jon Keegan

4/13/26

Stanford AI report: Model capability accelerating, China has closed the gap with the US

Stanford’s annual AI Index Report says “leading models are now nearly indistinguishable” from each other, and benchmarks used to evaluate them are falling behind their accelerating capabilities.

Rani Molla4/13/26

Meta will surpass Google in ad revenue this year, new industry data shows

In a world supported by digital ad dollars, Meta may soon be king. The Instagram owner’s net digital ad revenues are expected to hit $243.5 billion in 2026, surpassing Google’s projected $239.5 billion, according to new data from eMarketer.

The shift is happening as Big Tech companies, including Meta and Google, are increasing their spending on AI in hopes that AI will grow their top and bottom lines.

On the company’s last earnings call, Meta CFO Susan Li credited AI with driving performance gains, and said that growth will continue: “We expect the set of investments we’re making in 2026 will enable us to drive further gains as we continue to integrate AI across all layers of the marketing and customer engagement funnel.”

“In surpassing Google, Meta has essentially had many of its core strategies validated,” said Max Willens, principal analyst at eMarketer. “Meta has long understood that scale, network effects, and habits are more important than anything else in digital media. It has carefully built and defended the advantages it has in all three areas.”