Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Anthropic generated $16.8 billion in revenue for the third quarter.
The AI company shared the information at a pre-IPO investor meeting on Wednesday.
It’s a giant revenue leap from the previous quarter, though slower growth than earlier in the year.
Anthropic told investors it brought in $16.8 billion in revenue during the third quarter, Business Insider has learned.
The company behind Claude said Wednesday that it achieved profitability on an adjusted basis last quarter. Anthropic told investors this at a meeting meant to gin up interest for its gigantic initial public offering . The company is expected to list in November, at a valuation that could approach $2 trillion, which would be the largest ever at IPO. The Financial Times first reported on the revenue number and the adjusted profitability.
Investors view Anthropic’s revenue as a proxy for the company’s competition with OpenAI, and for the strength of an early AI market that has boosted stocks by trillions of dollars in value. It’s unclear if the new revenue tally counts gross or net revenue, or how Anthropic arrived at its definition of profitability.
A spokesperson for Anthropic declined to comment.
The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Anthropic brought in $4.8 billion in revenue in the first quarter, then more than doubled it to around $11.6 billion in the second quarter. Third-quarter revenue was up around 45% from the second quarter.
Harrison Rolfes, a private company analyst at PitchBook, told Business Insider that while the growth is impressive, he sees warning signs for Anthropic.
“They’re still growing, but not growing as fast. So they’re reaching this inflection point,” he said.
From the numbers, it isn’t clear how much Anthropic is spending to boost its revenues, Rolfes said. He says that the slower growth from the second to the third quarter could “shave” the valuation the company can seek in its IPO.
Since Anthropic is still private, these glimpses at revenue are a crucial stand-in for investors considering the coming IPO and AI’s impact on other stocks. Anthropic has historically counted its gross sales through cloud partners as revenue, though the company doesn’t get to cash the full sum.
A torrent of state-of-the-art AI models and strong adoption of the AI coding tool Claude Code have propelled Anthropic’s fortunes, making it one of the fastest-growing companies in history. In May, the company announced it closed a $65 billion funding round, valuing it at $965 billion. Anthropic needs these vast sums of cash to pay for computing from the chips that train and run its AI models.
In early September, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned with a declarative warning that, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Coxon’s statement, building on growing worries about AI cyberattacks, kicked worries about AI safety fully into the mainstream. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei swiftly published an essay calling for companies to “slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” so that safety measures can keep up.
Anthropic’s competitive landscape is also shifting. As open-source and open-weight models improved this year, some developers have opted to cut costs by switching over work from Anthropic and OpenAI’s tools. OpenAI is waging a price war with Anthropic. And Meta, Google, and SpaceXAI are also still pushing forward their model capabilities and AI products.
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