PALO ALTO: Anthropic’s revenue surged more than 14-fold in the second quarter from a year earlier, Bloomberg News reported Friday, underscoring the rapid growth of the Claude chatbot maker as it prepares for a potential blockbuster initial public offering.
The artificial intelligence company reported preliminary revenue of more than $11.5 billion for its latest completed quarter, up from $787 million in the same period last year and $4.73 billion in the first quarter of 2026, according to documents viewed by Bloomberg News.
Anthropic also posted positive adjusted operating income in the second quarter, according to the documents. The figures are preliminary and could still change, Bloomberg reported.
An Anthropic spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ahead of OpenAI in Corporate Race
The jump in revenue comes as Anthropic competes with OpenAI for corporate customers and has gained traction among professionals using its software for tasks including coding. Anthropic said in May that its run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion, up from roughly $10 billion in revenue in all of 2025.
The company’s early meetings with prospective investors ahead of its potential IPO have been high-level and have not included discussions about specific financials or a valuation, sources told CNBC’s David Faber on Thursday. Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao is leading the meetings, the sources said.
An IPO as soon as this fall could make Anthropic one of the first major private AI companies to tap public markets. That debut would unlock access to billions of dollars in additional capital, providing the immense financial runway required to fund escalating compute infrastructure costs, secure advanced hardware and build specialized data centers.
Wall Street Bets on Future Growth
As Anthropic prepares for what could be one of the biggest IPOs on record, Wall Street is looking further into the future than it commonly does to put a price on the AI company, valuing it based on how much revenue it could generate two years from now.
Anthropic is projecting 2028 revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion, according to Reuters. The projection dwarfs the $47 billion revenue run rate the company publicized as recently as May and shows the scale of growth investors are being asked to underwrite.
The pace of spending on AI investment has been responsible for pullbacks in many of the most popular tech stocks in recent months, including some of the firms viewed as comparable to Anthropic.
There have been precedents among some of the fastest-growing companies that hit the market recently. Backers of Cerebras Systems cited 2028 revenue expectations in the runup to the firm’s IPO this year, and SpaceX projections extended as far as 2029 before the company went public at a record valuation in June, the people said.
The approach reflects the difficulty of valuing an AI company whose margins are still being pressured by enormous spending on computing power, model training and hiring. Investors are betting that as Anthropic grows, revenue will rise faster than the costs required to support that growth, allowing margins to expand.
