Why OpenAI, Anthropic Missed Their Own Gross Margin Forecasts

OpenAI has become increasingly optimistic about the revenue it expects to generate from both consumers and businesses, pushing up its projections for the next five years. Clouding those forecasts, however, are escalating cloud server costs that have outstripped revenue growth.

Those pressures were stark last year, when OpenAI’s gross margins fell to 33% from 40% in 2024, missing its own forecasts of 46%. Archrival Anthropic, which also recently raised its revenue forecasts, said in December it anticipated 2025 gross margins of 40%. While that’s a big improvement from a negative 94% gross margin in 2024, it was still 10 percentage points short of Anthropic’s earlier goal.