Ahead of IPO, Anthropic reveals its revenue grew 45% sequentially to $16.8B in Q3

Anthropic PBC pulled in $16.8 billion in revenue during the third quarter, according to a report today by the Financial Times — and also achieved profitability on an adjusted basis for the first time.

The revelations came at a private meeting between Anthropic executives and investors interested in buying shares of the artificial intelligence company when it finally goes public. The company has been pushing ahead with its plans for an initial public offering, and is widely expected to list in November, targeting a valuation of up to $2 trillion, which would make it one of the most valuable companies on the planet.

Many investors see Anthropic’s revenue numbers as a bellwether for the broader AI market, which has helped boost the value of technology-related stocks by trillions of dollars. That said, there’s a lack of clarity about the latest number, as the Financial Times’ anonymous source didn’t say if it refers to gross or net revenue, or how Anthropic defines profitability.

Earlier numbers provided by the Wall Street Journal put Anthropic’s first quarter revenue at $4.8 billion, and it was later reported that the company had more than doubled this figure to $11.6 billion in the second quarter. Third-quarter revenue was therefore up about 45% on a sequential basis.

While the growth is encouraging, investors would like to know a lot more about the state of Anthropic’s finances, including how much money it’s spending to grow its revenue at such a rate. Because the company is still private, it doesn’t have to release such figures, so any indications like today’s figure can have a big impact on the broader stock market, given that the health of Anthropic and OpenAI Group PBC is critical to the fortunes of many other technology firms.

Last week, the Financial Times revealed that previously reported numbers about OpenAI’s annualized revenue run rate were erroneous, and revised its estimates down from about $68 billion, to just $50 billion. The report blamed a simple miscalculation by investigators, but it had a massive impact on tech stocks. The Nasdaq index fell 1.25% and the shares of many individual firms, including Oracle Corp., CoreWeave Inc., Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp., all fell more. Their fortunes are tightly linked to those of the AI giants, given that many have signed massive multiyear, multibillion-dollar contracts with them.

OpenAI was once perceived to be the market leader in AI, but this year it has been surpassed by Anthropic. It has released a torrent of state-of-the-art frontier models and benefited from strong enterprise adoption of its Claude Code tool that generates software code based on natural language instructions.

Anthropic is seen as one of the fastest-growing companies in history. In May, it closed on a bumper $65 billion round of funding, lifting its valuation to a staggering $965 billion. Such vast sums of cash are necessary in the AI industry to pay for the expensive computing chips needed to process AI models.

Despite the rampant growth of AI, the industry has recently come under pressure amid mounting safety concerns. While safety has always been an issue for AI, concerns reached fever pitch in September when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from the company, saying that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Coxon’s comments came after a number of high-profile cybersecurity incidents involving so-called “frontier models” emerged. They prompted Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei to publish an essay in which he called on companies to “slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” so that the industry has time to implement proper safety measures. Amodei’s call was backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and also Elon Musk and others, but U.S. President Donald Trump has rejected such talk, instead pushing for companies simply to self-regulate.

Safety isn’t the only issue facing the AI giants right now. The competitive landscape is also shifting fast amid concerns about the enormous costs of AI services. Many companies are shifting to open-source and open-weight models that can be accessed at much lower prices, and that trend has forced Anthropic and OpenAI to respond. Last week, Anthropic launched its most advanced small language model Claude Haiku 5.5, claiming that it costs around 75% less than its predecessor, Haiku 4.5, putting it on an equal footing with OpenAI’s SLM GPT-6 Luna.

Photo: Anthropic