A number the company has never published before
Anthropic told prospective investors that its revenue in the third quarter was $16.8 billion, CNBC reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The figure was presented at a meeting with potential shareholders ahead of an initial public offering that CNBC says is reportedly slated for November. It is the first time the company has put a quarterly result in front of the market.
The same people told CNBC that revenue was $11.6 billion in the second quarter and $4.7 billion in the first. On those numbers, the third quarter is about 45% larger than the second — and the second was about 147% larger than the first. Anthropic is still growing faster than almost anything else of its size. It is no longer close to tripling every three months.
Profitable, with an asterisk
Anthropic told investors it was profitable on an adjusted basis in the third quarter, and that it was cash-flow positive, generating $1.70 in revenue for every dollar it spent on computing power during the quarter, according to the Financial Times. The Decoder reports that the FT described this as a second consecutive quarter of adjusted profitability, and that The Information put the adjusted operating margin at just over 11%.
“Adjusted” is carrying weight in that sentence. It is not a measure defined by accounting standards, it excludes costs the company chooses to exclude, and until a prospectus is filed there is no audited statement against which to check it. What the $1.70 figure does say plainly is that the compute bill — the single cost that has made every frontier lab’s economics a matter of speculation — was smaller than the revenue it produced.
What investors are being asked to believe
Investors expect Anthropic to reach $110 billion in annualised revenue by year-end, according to the Wall Street Journal. That is a projection made by people considering buying the stock, not a result the company has reported, and the gap between the two is the whole question in front of the market.
The slowdown is the part worth holding onto. A quarter that grows 45% after one that grew 147% is not a bad quarter; it is a company whose first wave of adoption has largely landed and whose next one has to come from somewhere else. Anthropic declined to comment on the figures or on when it plans to list.
What to watch
None of these numbers has been filed. They reached the market through investor briefings and the reporters who were told about them, which is why every outlet carrying them attributes them to people familiar with the matter rather than to a document. The prospectus is where they become public, audited and legally consequential — and where the costs excluded from “adjusted” have to be shown.
