Anthropic IPO Nears as Q3 Revenue Hits $16.8 Billion

Anthropic told prospective investors on Wednesday that its third-quarter revenue surged 45 percent to $16.8 billion and that the company turned profitable on an adjusted basis, according to a pair of people who attended the event and spoke to Reuters. The figures were shared during an investor day at the company's San Francisco headquarters, held to introduce prospective buyers to the AI lab before the planned Anthropic IPO.

The quarter continues a steep climb. Revenue reached $4.7 billion in the first quarter and $11.6 billion in the second, so the third quarter alone brought in more than the first two combined. The nine-month total now stands at $33.1 billion. Those figures frame the valuation story behind the Anthropic IPO. One person who attended the San Francisco event told Reuters the company is projecting an annual revenue run rate of one hundred ten billion dollars by year's end. Reuters noted that its sources did not say which costs were excluded from the adjusted-profit figure, and Anthropic has not publicly confirmed the numbers.

Attendees met chief executive Dario Amodei and chief financial officer Krishna Rao. Several told Reuters as they left the headquarters that evening that they were optimistic about the company's growth trajectory and its path to profitability.

What the investor day revealed

Amodei reiterated the company's focus on AI safety during the meeting but avoided mentioning threats of human extinction, one attendee said. The choice of emphasis stood in contrast to a prospectus seen by Reuters last month, in which Anthropic warned that advanced AI could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity." On Wednesday, executives instead described how the company uses its own models to run parts of its business, including helping design a custom chip, Reuters reported.

Attendees were handed hats as they left, some reading "thinking." The day's figures matter beyond one company's balance sheet: a public listing by Anthropic would precede a planned market debut by rival OpenAI, making the Anthropic IPO an early test of investor appetite for AI developers that remain heavily unprofitable at scale, according to Reuters.

The Anthropic IPO race and the listing timeline

The Anthropic IPO debut is likely to come after the November 3 midterm elections, Reuters has reported. Formal marketing to investors could begin the week of November 9, which would put a first trading day before Thanksgiving within reach, according to Bloomberg. The interest is already visible in prediction markets: a Kalshi contract tracking whether OpenAI or Anthropic completes an IPO first priced the Anthropic IPO at roughly 17 cents on the dollar this week, an implied probability up about 12 points in 24 hours, reported tech publication Tech Insider. OpenAI has signaled it will wait until 2027.

Anthropic is targeting a valuation of more than two trillion dollars, which would more than double the roughly $965 billion valuation set by a private funding round in May, when the company raised $125 billion, according to previously published reports. The IPO paperwork was filed with the SEC in June, and Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Citigroup are working on the deal.

Why the numbers draw scrutiny

The growth is real, and so are the costs. Annual revenue reached nearly $4.6 billion last year, a twelvefold increase from 2024, while the company posted an operating loss of $8.06 billion and a net loss of $42 billion over the same period. Anthropic has committed at least $518 billion over the next decade to cloud services, computing, and infrastructure, with roughly 80 percent of those commitments non-cancelable. Amazon and Alphabet's Google, both investors in the company, supply much of the computing power used to train and run its Claude models.

The announcement landed on a crowded day for the AI industry. Google opened access to its latest frontier model, Gemini 4 Argon, for developers and businesses, while AI infrastructure financing kept straining: CoreWeave is exploring new capital from the insurance industry as the cost of building data centers outpaces traditional funding, according to a Tech Startups daily digest of the day's technology news. For more on how AI agents are moving through enterprise software, see our coverage of agent-to-agent observability for coding AI agents and DataRobot's sovereign agentic AI deal in the UAE.

Any prospectus filed for the Anthropic IPO would give investors their first verified look at how the company defines adjusted profitability and whether the growth can hold up under the cost of building frontier models, the central question of the offering. Sources for this story include AIStockWire's summary of the Reuters report, the full Reuters account by Milana Vinn and Krystal Hu, Crypto Briefing on the IPO preparations, Tech Insider on the IPO prediction market, and Tech Startups' October 14 technology digest.