Anthropic Brings In $16.8 Billion in Revenue in a Single Quarter

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A year ago, Anthropic would have needed almost four years to generate this much revenue. Now it takes one quarter. The maker of Claude brought in about $16.8 billion (roughly €15 billion) in the third quarter of 2026, Bloomberg reported. Management just presented the figures to prospective investors at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, a few weeks before its planned I.P.O. Anthropic declined to comment on the financial details.

The Numbers at a Glance

According to reports by Bloomberg and The Financial Times, the figures look like this:

• 2025 revenue: about $4.6 billion for the full year
• First quarter of 2026: about $4.8 billion
• Second quarter of 2026: about $11.5 billion
• Third quarter of 2026: about $16.8 billion, up roughly 46 percent from the previous quarter
• Annualized revenue: about $67 billion (roughly €60 billion), based on the third quarter
• Adjusted gross margin: about 85 percent
• Adjusted operating margin: more than 11 percent

That means Anthropic told investors it was profitable on an adjusted basis for the second quarter in a row and generated positive cash flow. For every dollar the company spent on computing power in the third quarter, it brought in about $1.70 in revenue. By comparison, Anthropic posted an operating loss of more than $8 billion in 2025, according to its I.P.O. prospectus.

What “Adjusted” Means at Anthropic

The word “adjusted” is the most sensitive point in Anthropic’s numbers. According to reports by The Financial Times and MarketWatch, the metric leaves out three major cost blocks:

• Training costs: The gross margin of about 85 percent is calculated before the cost of training new models. The margin therefore shows what Anthropic earns on models it has already built; the development of the next generation of Claude is not included. Yet training is one of the biggest expenses for any A.I. lab.
• Stock-based compensation: Anthropic excludes the value of the shares it uses to pay its researchers and engineers instead of cash. In an industry where top talent receives multimillion-dollar packages, that is a substantial item.
• Cloud partners’ share: The cut that Amazon and other partners keep for reselling Claude through their cloud platforms is also not deducted from the gross margin.

Critics put it bluntly: Anthropic is profitable if you ignore the cost of building Claude, as one widely cited commentary summed it up. Anthropic has not disclosed how large the excluded amounts are. Adjusted metrics are common in I.P.O.s, but the Securities and Exchange Commission requires a prospectus to reconcile them with figures under official accounting standards. Only then will the true size of the gap become visible.

What It Could Mean for the I.P.O.

Above all, the new figures are a sales pitch. According to Bloomberg, the formal marketing of the shares could begin as soon as the week of Nov. 9, with trading starting before Thanksgiving. The plans are not considered final. Prospective investors have discussed a valuation of $1.8 trillion to $2 trillion (roughly €1.6 trillion to €1.8 trillion). In its funding round in May, Anthropic was valued at about $965 billion.

Measured against annualized revenue of about $67 billion, a $2 trillion valuation would amount to roughly 30 times sales. A multiple like that can only be justified if growth continues for years. Similar expectations are already reflected in pre-I.P.O. products that let investors bet on Anthropic, such as the 21shares E.T.P.s on the Vienna Stock Exchange.

The figures come at a good time for Anthropic. Its rival OpenAI has put its own I.P.O. plans on hold, and recent reports that OpenAI’s revenue is falling well short of expectations sent A.I. stocks lower. Anthropic can use the numbers to present itself to investors as the financially stronger of the two big A.I. pioneers.

The Counterpoint: Adjusted Is Not Profitable

Beyond the adjusted metrics, there are other uncertainties. No complete income statement for the third quarter is available; the figures come from a presentation and have been neither audited nor published in a prospectus. Anthropic also books revenue from sales through Amazon’s and Google’s cloud platforms on a gross basis, which makes comparisons with OpenAI difficult.

Growth is also slowing: In the second quarter, revenue more than doubled from the previous quarter; in the third quarter, it rose about 46 percent. That compares with commitments of more than $500 billion for cloud, chips and infrastructure over the coming years. If growth weakens or prices for A.I. models fall, that could strain cash flow. According to the prospectus, almost a quarter of last year’s revenue came from just two customers.

That the market for A.I. I.P.O.s is no sure thing was shown recently by the Australian data center operator Firmus, which pulled its planned $30 billion listing.