Anthropic sent investors figures unlike anything anyone in the technology industry can remember. For the second quarter of this year, it reported revenue of more than $11.5 billion, compared with $787 million in the same period last year. In the first quarter of this year, the company generated $4.73 billion in revenue. Year-over-year growth therefore exceeded fourteenfold, accompanied by something no one expected from any major artificial intelligence lab: a positive adjusted operating profit.
This is best illustrated by the so-called run rate, which annualizes current revenue. At the end of last year, Anthropic was at around $9 billion; in May, it surpassed $47 billion, and by the end of July, it had exceeded $65 billion. The company disclosed this to investors as part of a routine financial results update. For comparison, Anthropic generated approximately $10 billion in revenue for all of last year. One quarter this year thus brought the company more revenue than the entire previous year.
First Profit in the Industry
For years, labs building large language models have been viewed as businesses doomed to permanent losses because the costs of computing power and training new models grow faster than revenue. The positive adjusted operating result for the second quarter challenges this view and suggests that previous losses stemmed more from investments in training future models than from unprofitable products.
The difference compared with the competition lies in the type of figure involved. The $11.5 billion represents actual invoiced revenue from April through June, which, together with the first quarter, amounts to roughly $16 billion for the first half of the year. While the run rate is an estimate, this is money that has already come in.
Battle with OpenAI
Meanwhile, OpenAI doubled its revenue to $40 billion from $20 billion at the end of last year. However, the two companies may not calculate the same metric in the same way, as Bloomberg notes. OpenAI is also expected to post a loss of around $14 billion this year.
Anthropic's growth is being driven primarily by corporate customers. The company, long regarded as an underdog in the artificial intelligence race, has seen an influx of professionals using its software for tasks such as programming. In particular, the coding agent built on Claude has gained popularity among developers, providing the company with stable revenue from the corporate sector.
Path to the Stock Market
The figures come as Anthropic prepares to go public. Anthropic filed an application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission back in June and has since been meeting with potential investors, although it has not yet announced an official listing date. If everything goes according to plan, it could appear on Wall Street as early as this fall.
Anthropic was most recently valued at $965 billion following a May funding round in which it raised $65 billion. Its valuation in February had been $380 billion. The company now needs to show investors that it can justify such a price tag. Expectations are very high. Investors expect a similar pace to continue for the rest of the year, with Anthropic ending 2026 with revenue of between $100 billion and $120 billion. The company also forecasts revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion for 2028, and the IPO valuation is based on these estimates.
The second-quarter figures remain preliminary and may still change, as negotiations are ongoing. Anthropic declined to comment.
Sources: cnbc.com, finance.yahoo.com and theinformation.com
Sources: cnbc.com, finance.yahoo.com and theinformation.com
