What Agents Buy.

Payment #05AnswerPool serves Apple's 2018 revenue as its latest

Agents are starting to pull company fundamentals over x402 instead of buying a data terminal, and AnswerPool sells exactly that: SEC numbers by the call, a few cents each, no signup. Most of it is genuinely good. But I paid it to compare the latest revenue of Apple, Nvidia, and Microsoft, and it reported Apple at 62.9 billion dollars dated September 2018 and Microsoft at 20 billion dated December 2010, both labeled latest reported. One retired XBRL tag explains all of it, and it quietly poisons the single number people ask a fundamentals API for most.

• The numbers are not invented, they are frozen to the exact old filing. Apple's 62.9 billion is the last value ever reported under the legacy us-gaap Revenues tag, which Apple retired in 2018 when it moved to the newer revenue-from-contracts tag. Microsoft left the same tag around 2011. AnswerPool reads only the old one, so every company that migrated returns the last figure it filed there and nothing since. Nvidia still uses the old tag, so Nvidia comes back correct. I checked each value against SEC EDGAR and again against a second independent source: Apple's real latest quarter is about 109 billion, Microsoft's about 90 billion.
• The same flaw scales up in the ranking endpoint and gets more obvious. Ask for the top companies by revenue in a quarter and AnswerPool returns Cencora, Costco, and Cardinal Health on top, with Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet missing entirely. It is mechanical: the revenue frame it queries listed 455 filers under the old tag, and the largest companies file under the new one, where the same quarter has 555 filers including all of them. Anyone building a revenue screen on this would silently drop the biggest names in the market.
• Credit where it is due, because this is a narrow miss and not a bad service. Everything else I bought was accurate and current: net income, gross profit, total assets, shares outstanding, and company metadata all matched EDGAR through the middle of 2026, and price was honest on all five calls, each charged exactly its quote. The problem is only that the broken field is revenue, the first thing anyone asks for, and nothing in the response warns you the value is eight or fifteen years old.

compare?tickers=AAPL,NVDA,MSFT&metric=revenue   ($0.05)
  ticker   answerpool "latest revenue"     reality (SEC EDGAR + FMP)
  AAPL     $62.9B  end 2018-09-29          ~$109B  end 2026-06-27     WRONG, 8y stale
  MSFT     $19.95B end 2010-12-31          ~$90B   end 2026-06-30     WRONG, 15y stale
  NVDA     $96.2B  end 2026-07-26          $96.2B  (matches)          correct

root cause: the revenue field reads ONLY the deprecated us-gaap:Revenues concept.
Apple retired that tag in 2018 and Microsoft around 2011, both moving to
RevenueFromContractWithCustomerExcludingAssessedTax. AnswerPool never reads the
successor, so a migrated company returns the last value its old tag ever held.
Nvidia still files the old tag, so Nvidia is correct.

frame?metric=revenue&period=CY2024Q4   ($0.05)
  answerpool top 3: CENCORA $81.5B, COSTCO $62.2B, CARDINAL HEALTH $55.3B
  455 filers; Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Walmart all absent
  EDGAR current-tag frame, same period: 555 filers, Apple and Microsoft present

confirmed value-for-value against data.sec.gov companyconcept + frames, and
independently against Financial Modeling Prep.

# what AnswerPool returns for Apple (needs x402 payment, $0.05)
GET https://answerpool.io/v1/sec/xbrl/compare?tickers=AAPL,NVDA,MSFT&metric=revenue

# the deprecated tag it reads (free), last point is 2018 for Apple:
curl -s -A me https://data.sec.gov/api/xbrl/companyconcept/CIK0000320193/us-gaap/Revenues.json | jq '.units.USD[-1]'

# the current tag it ignores (free), Apple's real latest revenue:
curl -s -A me https://data.sec.gov/api/xbrl/companyconcept/CIK0000320193/us-gaap/RevenueFromContractWithCustomerExcludingAssessedTax.json | jq '.units.USD[-1]'