Anthropic Tells Investors Q3 Revenue Hit $16.8B Ahead of November IPO

The figures were disclosed at a private meeting between Anthropic executives and investors interested in buying shares, according to the Financial Times and CNBC, which cited people familiar with the matter. CNBC reported that the company also told investors it was cash-flow positive and generated $1.70 in revenue for every dollar spent on computing power in the quarter. The Wall Street Journal, cited by CNBC, said investors expect Anthropic to reach $110 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year.

SiliconANGLE, citing the Financial Times, reported that Anthropic's first-quarter revenue was $4.8 billion and second-quarter revenue was $11.6 billion. CNBC, citing people familiar with the matter, put first-quarter revenue at $4.7 billion and second-quarter revenue at $11.6 billion. Both reports describe the third-quarter figure as a roughly 45% increase from the second quarter.

Some details remained unclear. The Financial Times' anonymous source did not say whether the $16.8 billion figure refers to gross or net revenue, or how Anthropic defines profitability. Because Anthropic is still private, it is not required to release audited financial statements, and the limited disclosure can influence broader technology stocks because the health of Anthropic and OpenAI Group PBC is tied to many other companies.

Investors view Anthropic's revenue as a bellwether for the AI market, which has added trillions of dollars to technology-related stock values. The company is widely expected to list in November, targeting a valuation of up to $2 trillion, which would make it one of the most valuable public companies in the world.

The disclosure follows a revision to OpenAI's revenue estimates. The Financial Times reported last week that previously reported numbers for OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate were erroneous, lowering the estimate from about $68 billion to $50 billion. The report attributed the change to a miscalculation by investigators. The correction hit technology shares: the Nasdaq index fell 1.25%, and Oracle Corp., CoreWeave Inc., Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp. all fell more. Many of those companies have signed multiyear, multibillion-dollar contracts with AI giants.

Anthropic has been seen as one of the fastest-growing companies in history. Earlier this year, it released a series of frontier models and gained strong enterprise adoption for Claude Code, a tool that generates software code from natural language instructions. In May, it closed a $65 billion funding round that lifted its valuation to $965 billion. The AI industry requires such sums to pay for expensive computing chips used to process AI models.

OpenAI was once perceived as the market leader in AI, but this year it has been surpassed by Anthropic, according to SiliconANGLE. Competition is also shifting as concerns about the cost of AI services push more companies toward open-source and open-weight models that can be accessed at lower prices. Last week, Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 5.5, its most advanced small language model, claiming it costs around 75% less than its predecessor, Haiku 4.5, and putting it on an equal footing with OpenAI's SLM GPT-6 Luna.

Safety concerns have intensified as well. In September, Anthropic researcher Jacob Croxon resigned, saying that "the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." His comments came after several high-profile cybersecurity incidents involving frontier models. Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei then published an essay calling on companies to slow the pace at which they improve AI model capabilities so the industry can implement proper safety measures. OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed the call, but U.S. President Donald Trump rejected it, pushing instead for companies to self-regulate.