Anthropic Reportedly Hit $16.8B in Quarterly Revenue Ahead of a Possible IPO

Anthropic walked into a San Francisco investor day on Wednesday with a message aimed squarely at the market’s biggest worry: the cost of building frontier AI is enormous, but the revenue is moving fast enough to keep up. The company told prospective investors that third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion, up 45% from the prior quarter, according to two people who attended the meeting.

That was a sharp jump from $11.6 billion in the second quarter and $4.7 billion in the first, the attendees said. Anthropic also said it was profitable on an adjusted basis in the third quarter. For a company heading toward an IPO, that is the sort of sentence investors want to hear right before they start doing the math on chips, data centers and everything else that keeps modern AI running.

The event itself was designed to warm up investors ahead of a public listing that could happen after the U.S. midterm elections in November, Reuters has reported. CEO Dario Amodei and CFO Krishna Rao met with attendees, who left sounding upbeat about both the revenue trajectory and the company’s path toward profitability. Amodei talked up AI safety, but one attendee said he did not get into the more apocalyptic language Anthropic has used elsewhere.

That softer tone mattered because Anthropic’s prospectus, seen by Reuters last month, warned that advanced AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” On Wednesday, executives instead showed off uses for their own AI inside the business, including help designing a custom chip. They also handed out hats, some marked “thinking,” which is exactly the sort of small theater these events love when the numbers are big enough to make everyone forget the cost base for a minute.

And the cost base is the real story. Anthropic is targeting a valuation above $2 trillion, and analysts who met with executives earlier this week estimated its annual revenue run rate could reach $110 billion by year-end. Last year revenue rose twelvefold to nearly $4.6 billion, but the company still lost more than $8 billion on an operating basis, excluding writedowns tied mostly to earlier fundraising. It has also committed at least $518 billion over a decade for cloud services, computing and infrastructure.