> Anthropic books the full value of marketplace contracts — sales agreements where customers buy access to Claude through a cloud provider's marketplace — as revenue because it sets prices and delivers the service, while recording the platforms' cut as a marketing cost.

> OpenAI has told investors and employees this approach inflates Anthropic's reported revenue by billions of dollars, Reuters reported in June. Anthropic told Reuters then that it follows established accounting practices, recognizing gross revenue because it is the “principal” in the transaction.

Obviously, OpenAI has a very large financial incentive to criticize their competitor, but it is kind of interesting that they're choosing specifically to attack them on accounting practices because their own IPO prospectus will surely receive the same scrutiny. One might assume that they'd want to avoid the accounting conversation altogether.