Anthropic PBC brought in $16.8 billion in third-quarter revenue and recorded its first profit on an adjusted basis, the Financial Times reported. Executives shared the figures at a private meeting with investors interested in buying shares when the AI company goes public.
Anthropic is pursuing an initial public offering. A November listing is widely expected, with the company targeting a valuation of up to $2 trillion. That would place it among the world’s most valuable companies.
Revenue rose 45% from the second quarter
The Wall Street Journal previously put Anthropic’s first-quarter revenue at $4.8 billion. A later report said revenue more than doubled to $11.6 billion in the second quarter. The latest figure represents an increase of about 45% from the second quarter.
The Financial Times’ anonymous source did not say whether the third-quarter figure was gross or net revenue. The source also did not explain how Anthropic defines adjusted profitability. Because Anthropic is private, it does not have to disclose how much it spends to generate that revenue.
Investors watch Anthropic’s results for signs of demand across the AI market. Last week, the Financial Times cut its estimate of OpenAI Group PBC’s annualized revenue run rate from about $68 billion to $50 billion, citing a calculation error. The Nasdaq fell 1.25%, while shares of Oracle Corp., CoreWeave Inc., Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp. fell further. Those companies have large, multiyear contracts with AI firms.
Costs and safety remain in focus
Anthropic has gained ground on OpenAI this year through new frontier models and business adoption of Claude Code, which generates software code from natural language instructions. In May, Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation. AI companies need substantial funding to buy the computing chips used to run their models.
Safety concerns have also intensified. Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned in September, saying “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” His comments followed cybersecurity incidents involving frontier models. Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei subsequently urged companies to “slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” to allow time for safety measures. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed his call. U.S. President Donald Trump rejected calls to slow development and favored self-regulation.
Price is another pressure point as companies turn to lower-cost open-source and open-weight models. Last week, Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 5.5, its most advanced small language model. Anthropic says it costs around 75% less than Haiku 4.5, putting its price on par with OpenAI’s GPT-6 Luna. Anthropic continues to pursue its initial public offering.
