Anthropic: Q2 revenue surged 14-fold; expects to reach $200 billion in 2028
Anthropic is updating potential investors that its revenue in the second quarter surged at least 14-fold compared to the same period last year. The maker of the chatbot Claude reported preliminary revenue of more than $11.5 billion for the recently ended quarter.
Anthropic is updating potential investors that its revenue in the second quarter surged at least 14-fold compared to the same period last year, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg. The maker of the chatbot Claude reported preliminary revenue of more than $11.5 billion for the recently ended quarter, compared to $787 million in the same period in 2025 and $4.73 billion in the first quarter of the year.
In the second quarter of 2026, Anthropic also reported positive adjusted operating income. Discussions are still ongoing and the data may change. A representative for Anthropic declined to comment.
The rapid growth comes as the company competes with its long-time rival OpenAI for business clients. Anthropic, previously considered a weaker player in the artificial intelligence race, is benefiting from a sharp increase in the adoption of its software among professionals, who use it to streamline tasks such as writing code. Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate crossed the $47 billion mark in May. OpenAI has an annualized revenue run rate of more than $40 billion, Bloomberg reported, although the two figures may not be calculated using the same method.
Anthropic began meeting with investors ahead of its potential massive IPO, people familiar with the matter said in July. The company has already filed registration documents ahead of the IPO and is working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and J.P. Morgan on the move. Anthropic seeks to leverage the public markets' large capital-raising capacity to maintain its edge over OpenAI and other companies, as AI firms spend hundreds of billions of dollars on developing the most advanced models.
Meanwhile, ahead of what could be one of the largest IPOs in history, Wall Street is looking further out than usual to determine Anthropic's valuation, pricing it based on the amount of revenue it may generate in two years. According to a Reuters report, Anthropic projects revenue of about $190–200 billion in 2028, according to two people familiar with the company's financial situation. This figure has not been published previously.
The forecast is much higher than the $47 billion revenue run rate, reflecting the company's current pace of activity, which Anthropic published only in May. It illustrates the scale of growth that investors are required to assume when evaluating the company. The reason Anthropic is examined primarily by revenue rather than profit is that the company is still spending huge sums on GPUs, computing power, training and running models, and hiring employees. These expenses are essential for its rapid growth, but investors estimate that as the company grows, revenue will rise faster than expenses, and these will become a smaller part of the operation.
Anthropic's revenue run rate was about $9 billion at the end of 2025, before rising to more than $47 billion in May. The rapid growth is the reason investors are willing to look as far as 2028 and assume that Anthropic's massive investments today will lead to much higher revenue and margins in the future. As technology improves, training and running models may become more efficient, while personnel and operating costs may become a smaller part of revenue.
"Can they (Anthropic) reach a valuation of $2 trillion? Yes, they can, and I just wonder if that valuation will stay there for a long time," said David Merkel, an investment manager at Aleph Investments. "Is AI really generating that much productivity gain... these are just questions we need to ask ourselves if we are thinking about pricing this, buying this."
