Ahead of the IPO, Anthropic said its third-quarter revenue rose 45% from the previous quarter to $16.8 billion

According to a report today in the Financial Times, Anthropic PBC posted third-quarter revenue of $16.8 billion – 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 moved forward with its IPO plans and is expected to go public in November. It’s aiming for a valuation of up to $2 trillion, which would make it one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Many investors view Anthropic’s revenue figures as an indicator of the broader AI market, which has helped boost the value of technology-related stocks by trillions of dollars. However, there is some confusion about the latest figure as the Financial Times’ anonymous source did not say whether it refers to gross or net revenue or how Anthropic defines profitability.

Previous figures from the Wall Street Journal put Anthropic’s first-quarter revenue at $4.8 billion. It was later reported that the company more than doubled that figure to $11.6 billion in the second quarter. As a result, third-quarter revenue increased approximately 45% sequentially.

While the growth is encouraging, investors would like to know a lot more about Anthropic’s financial position, including how much money the company is spending to grow its revenue at this pace. Because the company is still private, it doesn’t have to release such numbers, so signs like today’s number can have a big impact on the broader stock market, as the health of Anthropic and OpenAI Group PBC is crucial to the fortunes of many other tech companies.

Last week, the Financial Times revealed that previously published figures about OpenAI’s annual revenue rate were incorrect, revising its estimates from about $68 billion to just $50 billion. The report blamed a simple misjudgment by investigators, but it had a massive impact on tech stocks. The Nasdaq index fell 1.25%, and shares of many individual companies, including Oracle Corp., CoreWeave Inc., Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp., all fell more sharply. Their fortunes are closely linked to those of the AI ​​giants, as many of them have signed large, multi-year, multi-billion dollar contracts with them.

OpenAI was once considered the leader in AI, but this year it was overtaken by Anthropic. The company has released a flurry of cutting-edge Frontier models and benefited from strong enterprise adoption of its Claude Code tool, which generates software code based on natural language instructions.

Anthropic is considered one of the fastest growing companies in history. In May, the company closed a record $65 billion funding round, increasing its valuation to a staggering $965 billion. Such large sums of money are necessary in the AI ​​industry to pay for the expensive computer chips needed to process AI models.

Despite the rapid growth of AI, the industry has recently come under pressure due to increasing security concerns. While safety has always been an issue for AI, concerns reached a peak in September when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from the company, saying: “The people developing AI seriously believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Coxon’s comments came after a series of high-profile cybersecurity incidents involving so-called “frontier models” emerged. They prompted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to publish an essay calling on companies to “slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” so that the industry has time to implement appropriate security measures. Amodei’s call was supported by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as well as Elon Musk and others, but US President Donald Trump rejected such talks and instead simply pushed for the companies to regulate themselves.

Security isn’t the only problem facing the AI ​​giants right now. The competitive landscape is also changing rapidly as there are concerns about the enormous costs of AI services. Many companies are moving to open source and open weight models that are accessible at significantly cheaper prices, and this trend has forced Anthropic and OpenAI to respond. Last week, Anthropic launched its most advanced small language model, Claude Haiku 5.5, and said it costs around 75% less than its predecessor, Haiku 4.5, putting it on par with OpenAI’s SLM GPT-6 Luna.

Photo: Anthropocene