What's trending, explained.
What's trending, explained.
Anthropic used a private investor day in San Francisco on October 14 to make its case to prospective public-market investors ahead of its highly anticipated IPO — and the numbers were striking. Two attendees told Reuters that third-quarter revenue surged 45% from the prior quarter to $16.8 billion, up from $11.6 billion in Q2 and $4.7 billion in Q1. Quarterly revenue has more than tripled since the start of the year, putting the first nine months of 2026 at roughly $33 billion.
The company also told the room it was profitable on an adjusted basis in the third quarter, and one attendee said Anthropic expects an annual revenue run rate of $110 billion by year's end. CEO Dario Amodei and CFO Krishna Rao hosted the event; attendees reportedly left optimistic, met with talk of how the company is using its own AI to design a custom chip — and with hats reading "thinking" handed out as souvenirs.
Notably, Amodei reiterated Anthropic's focus on AI safety but avoided discussing human-extinction risks. That's a shift in emphasis: the company's IPO prospectus, seen by Reuters last month, warned that advanced AI could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity."
Anthropic's listing is expected to come before rival OpenAI's public debut, making it the first real test of how much investors will pay for frontier AI companies that are spending enormous sums to pursue scale. Reuters has previously reported that Anthropic has committed hundreds of billions of dollars in future spending through long-term cloud, computing, and infrastructure agreements — with Google and Amazon as investors, suppliers, and distribution partners all at once.
The company is reportedly targeting a valuation above $2 trillion and an offering that could raise up to $100 billion, which would rank among the largest IPOs in history. But the market will scrutinize the gap between surging revenue and the colossal costs beneath it: earlier reporting showed infrastructure spending alone topping $7 billion last year, and the revenue figures Anthropic shared are unaudited numbers from a private pitch meeting, not published financials.
There's also the competitive backdrop. Just a day earlier, eight state attorneys general sued OpenAI over ChatGPT's harms to young users — a reminder that the regulatory environment for AI companies is tightening exactly as they ask public markets for record valuations. Anthropic's safety-first branding is part of how it differentiates itself; whether investors buy that story at a $2 trillion price tag is the question.
Reuters has reported that the public debut is likely to be pushed until after the November 3 US midterm elections. A November listing would let Anthropic show prospective investors a completed third quarter of financials before pricing, rather than asking them to extrapolate from a partial quarter.
If the offering succeeds at anything close to its reported target valuation, it resets the benchmark for the entire AI sector — and for OpenAI, which would follow into public markets with its own slate of litigation and scrutiny. Watch for Anthropic's formal S-1 filing to become public in October: that document will show whether the unaudited Q3 numbers hold up, and whether the much-discussed Nvidia anchor investment appears by name.