Anthropic’s revenue climbed to more than $11.5 billion in the second quarter of 2026, over 14 times the $787 million it brought in a year earlier, according to preliminary figures the company shared with prospective investors and reviewed by Bloomberg. The maker of the Claude chatbot also posted positive adjusted operating income for the first time — a rare milestone among frontier AI labs, most of which still spend far more on compute and talent than they take in.
The jump follows a steep climb through the year. Anthropic’s revenue reached $4.73 billion in the first quarter, and its annualized run rate crossed $47 billion in May, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025 — a pace that, as of that month, had pulled ahead of OpenAI’s reported run rate of more than $40 billion.
Investors court an IPO
The figures are landing as Anthropic prepares for what could be one of the largest technology listings on record. The company has confidentially filed paperwork with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and is working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase on the offering. Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao has started early, informal meetings with investors, though people familiar with the talks say the company itself has not yet discussed a specific valuation.
Some investors are nonetheless modeling a listing worth around $2 trillion as soon as October, according to people familiar with the matter — roughly double the $965 billion valuation Anthropic reached in May, when it raised $65 billion in a Series H round led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital.
A bet on future growth, not just current results
Bankers are said to be pricing the IPO using enterprise-value-to-revenue multiples based on forecasts stretching two years out, rather than current results alone — an unusually long horizon that reflects how quickly Anthropic’s business has scaled, but also how much of the pitch rests on projections. That growth has come with steep costs: Anthropic has signed infrastructure deals worth tens of billions of dollars this year, including a $10 billion compute agreement with the startup Volta, to keep pace with demand for its models.
The figures are preliminary and could be revised, and Anthropic has not publicly confirmed them. Still, the results mark a shift for an industry long defined by heavy losses, and will be closely watched as OpenAI and DeepSeek weigh their own paths to the public markets.