The Silicon Valley startup behind the Claude artificial intelligence is set to make history. Anthropic expects an operating profit for the first time, while revenue in the second quarter of this year is expected to exceed $10.9 billion. That is more than the company earned in all of 2025. What is more, it is more than double what it reported just a few months earlier. The company shared the figures with investors as part of an ongoing funding round. Operating profit is expected to reach $559 million for the June quarter, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The founders, including Dario and Daniela Amodei, left OpenAI in 2021 due to disagreements over the company's direction. At the time, few considered them a direct threat to ChatGPT. But times have changed faster than anyone expected, including Anthropic itself. Revenue in the first quarter of 2026 reached $4.8 billion. In the second quarter, it is expected to surpass $10.9 billion. That represents quarter-over-quarter growth of approximately 130 percent.
Dario Amodei himself admitted at a developer conference in San Francisco in early May that the company had planned for tenfold annual growth. The reality? Eightyfold. “That is just crazy and very difficult to manage," Amodei said on stage.
Claude Code is behind it all
What is driving such rapid growth? To a large extent, a single product. Claude Code, an artificial intelligence-powered tool for software developers, has become the fastest-growing product in the company's history since its public launch in mid-2025. It surpassed $1 billion in annualized revenue just six months after launch. By February 2026, it was generating more than $2.5 billion in annualized revenue.
Developers were the first customer group to embrace it. Amodei described this as “a preview of how it will work across the entire economy." But it is not just programmers, who consider it the best AI tool for coding. Anthropic has also begun successfully expanding into large enterprises. The number of enterprise customers spending more than $1 million annually has doubled since February. Growing demand from both businesses and consumers ultimately led to what Anthropic itself described as the “inevitable overload" of its own infrastructure.
SpaceX deal: $1.25 billion per month
How is Anthropic addressing its hunger for computing power? It struck a deal with a company few would have expected. Elon Musk and his SpaceX have become a key supplier of computing capacity to a direct competitor.
According to SpaceX's IPO (initial public offering) prospectus, Anthropic has committed to paying $1.25 billion per month for access to the Colossus and Colossus II computing centers in Memphis, Tennessee, through May 2029. The agreement covers more than 220,000 Nvidia graphics cards and over 300 megawatts of power. Either party may terminate the contract with ninety days' notice.
The impact was immediately apparent. Hours after signing the agreement, Anthropic doubled the time limits for Claude Code on paid plans, removed restrictions during peak hours, and increased throughput for users of the Opus model. The capacity agreement translated directly into product improvements that same day. Elon Musk then announced on X that SpaceX was negotiating similar agreements with other companies. Meanwhile, SpaceX's computing segment reported a loss of approximately $2.5 billion on revenue of $818 million in the first quarter, making this partnership an important source of revenue for both parties.
A profit that may not last
Although the figures look excellent, people familiar with the situation caution that profitability may not persist throughout the year. Planned infrastructure spending in the second half of 2026 could push margins down again.
The SpaceX contract alone represents an expense exceeding $1 billion per month. Other agreements with additional providers add to that. Google has pledged an investment of up to $40 billion and cloud capacity starting in 2027, while Amazon has pledged up to $25 billion. However, most of this capacity will not come online until the end of this year at the earliest. Anthropic is therefore walking a tightrope: record demand on one side and enormous computing costs on the other. The second-quarter profit is real, but sustaining it will require revenue growth to outpace rising infrastructure spending as well.
Will Anthropic surpass OpenAI in valuation too?
Anthropic is now negotiating a new funding round with investors. A sum of $30 billion to $50 billion is on the table at a valuation exceeding $900 billion. That would put the company ahead of OpenAI, whose most recent valuation from March this year stands at $852 billion.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is preparing a confidential IPO filing, working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Anthropic is also considering going public, potentially as early as this fall.
The profitable quarter comes at the right time. Giving investors evidence before an IPO that the company can make money is an argument that looks better in stock exchange filings than any user growth chart.
Sources: reuters.com, cnbc.com and ft.com
