Anthropic's revenue run rate hits $65 billion as IPO nears

Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate surpassed $65 billion at the end of July, more than sevenfold from a year earlier, as the Claude maker accelerates toward a public listing that could value it at $2 trillion or more. The figure, reported by Bloomberg and confirmed by CNBC, marks the latest milestone in an AI arms race that has reshaped how enterprises deploy large language models.

The company shared the figure in a regular update to investors over the weekend, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the details are private. Anthropic declined to comment. The run rate climbed from $47 billion in May and just $9 billion at the end of last year, while preliminary second-quarter revenue reached $11.5 billion, a 14-fold jump from a year earlier, one person said.

Investors expect the growth to continue at roughly the same pace for the rest of the year, with Anthropic finishing 2026 between $100 billion and $120 billion, the Financial Times reported. Rival OpenAI, by comparison, doubled its run rate to $40 billion from $20 billion at the end of 2025, according to Bloomberg.

Both companies have filed confidential IPO paperwork, but Anthropic is expected to hit the public markets first — possibly as soon as this fall — seeking a valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would make it the largest market debut on record. The company was last valued at $965 billion in late May, when it raised a $65 billion round.

Why the growth gap matters

Anthropic's revenue trajectory has captivated investors more than OpenAI's, even though the two companies may calculate their revenue metrics differently. The acceleration reflects surging enterprise demand for Claude, whose adoption has grown as businesses move from experimentation to production workloads in coding, customer service and data analysis.

The revenue surge also supports the enormous capital being poured into frontier AI. Anthropic's $65 billion round in May — one of the largest private financings ever — came with expectations that the company would convert heavy compute spending into durable subscription and API revenue. The run rate figures suggest that conversion is happening faster than many anticipated, with enterprise tools proving stickier than consumer chatbots. Claude's coding and agentic features, in particular, have become a benchmark that enterprises weigh against OpenAI's GPT models and Google's Gemini when choosing a primary model provider.

What's at stake for investors

For public-market investors, Anthropic's debut will test whether the AI boom can sustain the valuations private markets have assigned. A $2 trillion listing would dwarf every prior tech IPO, and the company's growth rate — roughly 600 percent annualized — would give it a revenue multiple that even the most richly valued software names have rarely commanded.

OpenAI's slower growth, by contrast, has raised questions about whether consumer-facing AI monetizes as quickly as enterprise tools. Anthropic's enterprise-first strategy appears to be the model investors are rewarding. The outcome of its IPO will shape how the market prices the rest of the AI complex, from Nvidia and Microsoft to a pipeline of private model makers waiting in the wings, and will test whether the sector's massive compute spending can translate into public-market returns.

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