Anthropic tells pre-IPO investors third-quarter revenue hit $16.8 billion

Anthropic told prospective investors in San Francisco on Wednesday that third-quarter revenue rose 45% from the previous quarter to $16.8 billion, up from $11.6 billion in the second quarter and $4.7 billion in the first. The Financial Times reported the figure first, and Reuters confirmed it with two people who attended the meeting. There was no filing, no audit and no comment from the company.

What the attendees heard

Attendees met CEO Dario Amodei and finance chief Krishna Rao and came away optimistic, a few of them told Reuters. Anthropic also said it was profitable on an adjusted basis in the quarter, again per attendees; what that measure excludes was not disclosed. Amodei repeated the company's focus on AI safety but skipped threats of human extinction, one person said, though the prospectus warns advanced AI could pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity. Executives described using their own models internally, including to help design a custom chip, and handed out hats that read "thinking."

Why 45% is not the whole story

The deceleration is what investors fixated on. Revenue more than doubled from the first quarter to the second, then rose 45% into the third. By Thursday, Reuters reported, some current and prospective investors were weighing a valuation of about $1.5 trillion, down from the roughly $2 trillion expected for the November sale. Analysts who met executives earlier in the week estimated the annual revenue run rate could reach $110 billion by year end. That is an analyst extrapolation, not guidance. Last year revenue rose twelvefold to nearly $4.6 billion while the company lost more than $8 billion on an operating basis, excluding writedowns.

The IPO, and the bill behind it

The meeting was meant to warm up prospective investors before a listing Anthropic hopes will value it above $2 trillion. Reuters has reported the debut will likely be pushed past the November midterm elections and is expected to precede OpenAI's. Anthropic has committed at least $518 billion over a decade to cloud services, computing and infrastructure, and is adding more, including its Osaka data centre. Google and Amazon are investors, compute suppliers, distribution partners and competitors at the same time, so much of the growth is spent back inside the companies funding it. Reuters describes much of that buildout as resting on contracts that cannot be canceled.

What would settle it

An audited registration statement with GAAP figures would. So would Anthropic's own definition of the adjusted profit measure, the cancellation terms on the $518 billion, and a segment breakdown showing what the compute partnerships cost. Until then, $16.8 billion is a number relayed from a conference room the public cannot enter.