Anthropic brings in $16.8 billion in Q3, but growth slows ahead of its planned November IPO

Anthropic has presented its quarterly figures to prospective investors at a private meeting in San Francisco, according to several US media outlets cited by The Decoder. Third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion, an increase of roughly 45% over the second quarter and more than 3.6 times the company's total annual revenue in 2025.

Growth has slowed, however. In the second quarter, strong demand for the developer tool Claude Code had pushed revenue up more than 140% over the first quarter. The article suggests that summer may have played a part, since people work less during those months and use fewer tokens. In addition, OpenAI launched a strong competitor, Astra, in September, and Anthropic was only able to respond at the end of that month with Opus 5.5.

Profitability: according to The Information, Anthropic posted an adjusted operating margin of 11% for the year to date through the third quarter. That figure excludes major costs such as stock-based compensation, but it points to progress toward profitability. The Financial Times notes that this is the second consecutive quarter of adjusted profitability and that the company is generating cash. In the third quarter, it earned $1.70 in revenue for every dollar spent on compute, which suggests trained models can be profitable despite months of price wars. Caveats remain: high training and staff costs, and the risk that open-weight alternatives will replace proprietary models such as Claude.

Distillation: Anthropic estimates that 5% to 7% of its revenue comes from distillation, that is, from other companies using its AI to extract information about how it works and train their own models. The company has repeatedly accused Chinese labs of copying its models this way. It recently deployed effective countermeasures, which, according to the article, raises the question of why it put so much effort into lobbying against distillation if it had the tools to stop it. Anthropic told investors that this revenue will likely fall and weigh on the current quarter's figures, although in the long run blocking distillation should make it harder for rivals to match Claude's quality.

The IPO: according to The Information, it is planned for November, before Thanksgiving, and will be the biggest test yet of investor appetite for the AI boom. Anthropic's private valuation jumped to $965 billion in May, from less than $20 billion two years earlier, and some bankers even floated a $2 trillion IPO. However, the figures presented reportedly disappointed some prospective investors. Several expect the advising banks to lower valuation expectations, possibly to below $1.5 trillion, especially since the company did not discuss its September annualized revenue run rate or give full-year guidance. In July, that run rate was reportedly $65 billion.

Market context: the timing is not ideal. Inflation remains high, borrowing costs are rising, public opinion of AI is more negative than positive, and unresolved cybersecurity risks pose an operational threat. On top of that, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others have been locked in a price war for months, while open models are closing the performance gap. Even so, the article concludes that AI use will keep growing as its capabilities are built into more office work.

Note: the data comes from press reports (Financial Times and The Information) compiled by The Decoder, not from official company statements.