Anthropic told investors it booked $16.8 billion in revenue in the third quarter, and that the company turned profitable on an adjusted basis for the first time. The numbers came out of a closed meeting with investors who want to buy shares before the listing. The Financial Times reported it first; the Wall Street Journal followed.
The jump from quarter to quarter
First-quarter revenue was $4.8 billion, second quarter a little over $11.5 billion. Getting from there to $16.8 billion is about 45 percent growth in three months. The IPO is expected in November at a target valuation of up to $2 trillion. For scale: the May funding round closed at $65 billion on a $965 billion valuation.
Gross or net? The source doesn’t say
This is where it gets awkward. The FT’s anonymous source didn’t say whether the $16.8 billion is gross or net, and didn’t say how Anthropic defines profitability. That distinction is exactly what any comparison with OpenAI hangs on, as I wrote when the two companies’ booking methods came up. The same company in the same shape can report two very different numbers, and while it stays private it has to disclose neither.
Why the market flinches
Last week showed how twitchy this has become. The FT revised its own estimate of OpenAI’s annualised revenue run rate down from roughly $68 billion to $50 billion and blamed a miscalculation. The Nasdaq fell 1.25 percent, and Oracle, CoreWeave, Intel and Nvidia fell further. Those companies sit on multi-year contracts with the two big labs, so any figure from either one moves share prices.
What actually matters in November
A $2 trillion valuation resting on numbers nobody can audit — that is the heart of this IPO. The prospectus changes it. That document will say what Anthropic spent on compute to earn the $16.8 billion, and only that second number makes the first one interesting. Until then the report is a signal, not a result. I’m curious how close the audited figure lands to the one investors heard.