Anthropic’s revenue is a on a tear — but time will tell if it can sustain a $2 trillion valuation at its IPO.
Anthropic has told investors that its revenue for the third quarter climbed nearly 50% to $16.8 billion, and that the company turned a profit on an adjusted basis for the second straight quarter, according to a report from the Financial Times. Anthropic shared the figures as it gears up for what could be the largest IPO in history, slated for November.
The FT report, citing people with knowledge of the matter, says the growth marks a slowdown from earlier in the year — revenue had more than doubled between the first and second quarters, climbing from about $4.8 billion to $11.5 billion. The pace in Q3, while still strong, fell short of what some of Anthropic’s own backers had been expecting.
Anthropic did not disclose an updated annualised revenue run-rate, which stood at $65 billion at the end of July. Research firm SemiAnalysis has estimated, based on the new quarterly numbers, that the figure has since grown to roughly $74 billion — well below the more bullish forecasts some investors were circulating over the summer, when projections of surpassing $100 billion in annualised revenue by year-end were common.
What Anthropic told investors
According to the FT, Anthropic held a full day of investor presentations at its San Francisco office, where executives — including CEO Dario Amodei and CFO Krishna Rao — walked through the company’s growth, efficiency gains and safety-focused approach as part of its IPO pitch. As per the report, Anthropic is now cash-flow positive. For every $1 spent on computing power in Q3, it generated $1.70 in revenue. Adjusted operating margins (excluding stock-based compensation) came in at 11%
Executives reportedly cautioned that margins could shift going forward as the company plans to pour more money into compute infrastructure and biomedical research.
Anthropic’s valuation and revenue history
Anthropic’s valuation has climbed in a near-vertical line over the past two years. The company was valued at $61.5 billion in March 2025 after a $3.5 billion fundraise, nearly tripled to $183 billion by that September, and then jumped again to $380 billion in February 2026 on the back of a $30 billion Series G round — a leap that put Anthropic in the same bracket as OpenAI and SpaceX among the world’s most valuable startups. By May 2026, a $65 billion raise pushed the figure to $965 billion, and reporting around Anthropic’s IPO prospectus has pointed to a target north of $2 trillion for the public listing itself ().
The revenue story has grown just as fast. Anthropic’s annualized revenue went from roughly $1 billion at the start of 2025 to over $5 billion by that August, with products like Claude Code adding hundreds of millions, then billions, in run-rate revenue on their own. Anthropic’s IPO prospectus disclosed that full-year 2025 revenue came in at $4.6 billion, alongside a net loss of close to $42 billion, with the vast majority of that loss coming from an accounting charge tied to the rising value of convertible financing rather than cash burn. Even with that loss on the books, investors have kept pricing Anthropic on its growth curve rather than its bottom line, which is how a company with single-digit-billions in revenue two years ago is now being talked about as a multi-trillion-dollar IPO candidate.