Anthropic Q2 revenue tops $11.5 billion as IPO nears

Anthropic's preliminary second-quarter revenue exceeded $11.5 billion, up more than 14-fold from a year earlier, as the AI developer turned its first adjusted operating profit while preparing for a public listing that investors value near $2 trillion.

"Anthropic is worth $3 trillion today," Gavin Baker, managing partner and chief investment officer at Atreides Management, said on the All-In Podcast in June. "They are going to end this year with well over $100 billion" in annualized revenue.

The $11.5 billion preliminary figure compares with $787 million in the year-ago quarter and $4.73 billion in the first quarter, according to a Bloomberg report citing a disclosure to potential investors. Annualized revenue surpassed $47 billion in May, and the company reported positive adjusted operating income for the second quarter. Anthropic has raised $95 billion this year, including a $30 billion Series G and a $65 billion Series H in May, and has committed more than $130 billion to AWS and Microsoft Azure compute over the next decade.

The disclosure comes as Anthropic works with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan on an IPO after filing confidentially in June. Investors have modeled a valuation of $2 trillion to $3 trillion, which would rival or exceed SpaceX's record $75 billion raise at a roughly $1.75 trillion valuation in June. At $2 trillion, Anthropic would trade at about 33 times projected 2026 sales of roughly $60 billion, according to Reuters Breakingviews estimates.

The margin question

Anthropic's path to profitability rests on inference economics. SemiAnalysis estimated the company's gross margin on inference infrastructure rose from 38% to more than 70% this year, helped by falling token-production costs, with Opus 4.8 carrying inference gross margins above 85%. But the company's adjusted operating margin of roughly 5% on second-quarter revenue remains thin, and Reuters Breakingviews has cautioned that Anthropic may not stay profitable for the full year as compute spending rises.

The competitive stakes are high. Anthropic's Fable 5 model generated roughly three-quarters as much model-attributed spending as OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol in July, according to Ramp's AI Index, while Anthropic led paid business adoption at 43.5% of eligible businesses. But adoption growth slowed, and enterprise buyers are increasingly sorting workloads by price and performance, with model-serving platforms that offer cheaper open-weight and Chinese-developed models rising from 4.5% of AI-spending businesses in January to 6.1% in July.

The valuation math

Anthropic's valuation rests on both revenue growth and margin expansion. At a $2 trillion valuation, the company would trade at roughly 325 times annualized operating profit at its current 5.1% margin, or about 56 times operating profit even at a 30% margin. There is no clean public-market comparable: Palantir and Nebius, which Anthropic's backers have cited, trade at around 55 times revenue but lack Anthropic's operating model.

The company also faces regulatory friction. The Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk after it refused to remove restrictions on autonomous weapons and surveillance, and the Commerce Department imposed export controls on Fable and Mythos in June before lifting them less than three weeks later. The underlying litigation over the Pentagon designation remains unresolved.

Anthropic's capital and compute commitments are intertwined with its largest backers. Amazon has invested $13 billion directly, with another $20 billion available subject to commercial milestones, while Anthropic committed to spending more than $100 billion with AWS over 10 years. The circularity of that spending — hyperscalers funding the model developer that in turn buys their compute — complicates any valuation read.

For investors, the question is whether Anthropic can convert its revenue surge into durable profit. The company's own disclosure shows a 5.1% adjusted operating margin on quarterly revenue, a figure that would need to expand several-fold to justify a $2 trillion price tag. The S-1, expected ahead of an October listing, will clarify whether sales routed through cloud partners are counted on a gross or net basis — a distinction that could shift the revenue base materially.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.