Anthropic Tells Investors Third-Quarter Revenue Hit $16.8 Billion and It Turned a Profit

Anthropic's third-quarter revenue rose 45% to $16.8 billion, according to an investor who attended the company's pre-IPO meeting with prospective investors in San Francisco on Wednesday, and the Financial Times reported that the company told investors it turned a profit in the quarter.

The attendee's figures trace a steepening curve: revenue of $4.7 billion in the first quarter and $11.6 billion in the second, before the third quarter's $16.8 billion. The meeting was held to familiarize prospective investors with the company ahead of its initial public offering, and it was the first time Anthropic had shown third-quarter figures. The profit claim arrived without a number attached: the Financial Times, whose report was carried on Wednesday evening, said the company turned a profit in the quarter, and Investor's Business Daily described the profit as being on an "adjusted basis." How large the profit was, and exactly what the adjusted measure leaves out, was not disclosed in the reports. Reports also differ slightly on the base: the Financial Times put second-quarter revenue at $11.5 billion, which makes the quarterly growth 46% rather than 45%.

The open question is what counts as revenue

That gap matters because of how Anthropic counts sales. Going into the meeting, the live question — flagged in CNBC's preview of the investor day — was whether Anthropic's revenue includes sales through cloud partners, and on what basis. Last week OpenAI told its investors to work from a $50 billion revenue figure rather than the $70 billion widely reported, because the lower number stripped out revenue from cloud partners; the confusion around that revision dragged down semiconductor stocks and the Nasdaq. Anthropic's own accounting, described in its draft prospectus, runs the other way: it books the full value of contracts sold through cloud marketplaces as revenue, because it sets the prices and delivers the service, and records the platforms' cut as a marketing cost. The platforms matter to the cash, too — third parties were responsible for collecting 60% of the $909 million in customer bills outstanding at the end of 2025.

Growth is being asked to outrun a $518 billion bill

Anthropic is targeting a valuation of over $2 trillion, and the growth is the argument that its revenue can eventually outrun the enormous cost of building and running its systems. The starting point is stark: in 2025 the company grew revenue 12-fold to nearly $4.6 billion, lost more than $8 billion on an operating basis, and posted a net loss of $42 billion, roughly $34 billion of it an accounting charge tied to financing instruments rather than cash spent. It has also committed hundreds of billions of dollars in future spending under long-term agreements for cloud services, computing and infrastructure — $518 billion in obligations, according to the prospectus reporting. The company's expansion is underpinned by Alphabet's Google and Amazon, which are at once its investors, its suppliers of computing power, important distribution partners and its competitors. The listing is expected to precede a public debut by rival OpenAI, and Reuters has reported it is likely to be pushed until after the November midterm elections — which makes Anthropic the market's first full test of what investors will pay for a heavily loss-making AI developer operating at this scale.

A private quarter that moved public markets

The numbers did not stay in the room. Wednesday was already a hard day for the AI trade — a hot September inflation print, a chip index falling for a sixth straight session and a 15.5% plunge in CoreWeave — and in after-hours trading S&P 500 futures slipped 0.25% and Nasdaq-100 futures gave up 0.5% as the Anthropic reports circulated, while Dow futures were flat, according to Investor's Business Daily's evening read. That is the new pattern: the private AI labs file no public financial statements, yet their figures now set the price of public chips, cloud debt and index futures within hours. What remains unknown after Wednesday is nearly everything below the headline — the size of the profit, the split of revenue between direct sales and cloud marketplaces, and the audited picture that only a public prospectus will provide. Anthropic declined to comment before the meeting, its registration statement is still not public, and Thursday brings Taiwan Semiconductor's earnings and the producer-price report, the next two public reads on the same trade.