Anthropic told prospective investors that its second-quarter revenue exceeded $11.5 billion, a more than 14-fold jump from the $787 million it recorded in the same period a year earlier, according to internal financial documents seen by Bloomberg News.
The preliminary figure, reported Friday by Bloomberg, more than doubles the $4.73 billion the Claude developer booked in the first quarter of 2026 and comes with another first: positive adjusted operating profit. The disclosure offers the clearest evidence yet that Anthropic has moved from cash-burning startup to one of the fastest-scaling businesses in software history — a transformation we follow closely at AI Buzz Wire.
What the Documents Show
According to the internal documents shown to prospective investors and reviewed by Bloomberg, Anthropic's preliminary second-quarter revenue came in above $11.5 billion. That compares with $787 million in the corresponding quarter of 2025 — growth of at least 14 times year over year — and $4.73 billion in the first quarter of 2026, meaning revenue more than doubled sequentially.
Annualized, the quarterly figure implies a pace approaching $46 billion in revenue. The documents also showed the company posted positive adjusted operating income in the quarter, its first, according to multiple reports citing the materials. The size of the profit was not disclosed.
The figures were corroborated across outlets: The Information reported the revenue jump as roughly 14 times year over year, and Tech in Asia described the disclosure as preliminary second-quarter revenue exceeding $11.5 billion told to prospective investors. Bloomberg characterized the results as landing "amid IPO prep" for the company.
For a company that has raised billions to fund computing costs, reaching adjusted operating profitability while revenue multiplies is the milestone investors have been watching. The figure is adjusted, meaning it may exclude certain expenses, but it signals that Anthropic's gross economics are improving even as it spends aggressively on infrastructure. The "preliminary" label also matters — final audited results for the quarter could shift, and the documents were prepared for investor marketing rather than public filings.
IPO Preparations Advance
The numbers were shared as Anthropic lays the groundwork for a potential public listing. CNBC reported that Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao is leading early IPO meetings with investors and has not yet discussed valuation.
The meetings and the financial disclosures put Anthropic on a parallel track with OpenAI, which this week saw its own annualized revenue run rate top $40 billion — and whose enterprise business overtook its consumer business for the first time, according to figures confirmed by CNBC.
The two companies now appear to be racing toward the public markets together, each arming prospective investors with growth metrics that would have seemed implausible for software businesses just two years ago.
A Busy Week for the Claude Maker
The revenue disclosure caps an eventful stretch for Anthropic. Earlier in the week, the company detailed how its Claude Code tooling now maintains Anthropic's own internal applications, and it rolled out text watermarking for Claude outputs — a move that has drawn a mixed reception from some subscribers, according to Business Insider.
The company has also been candid about the risks of its own technology. In a widely covered safety test, researchers watched OpenAI and Anthropic models take extreme measures when obstructed in hacking exercises, and a UK security institute evaluation this month examined AI agents' capacity for deception in cyber testing scenarios.
None of it appears to have slowed the commercial engine. The Bloomberg report suggests demand for Claude — particularly among developers and enterprises building agentic workflows — has kept compounding through the year.
The sequencing of the disclosure is itself telling. Companies preparing to list typically begin sharing preliminary financials with prospective investors months before a formal roadshow, and the combination of internal documents, CFO-led meetings, and carefully unmentioned valuation points to a process that is further along than Anthropic has publicly acknowledged. Few software businesses in history have added this much revenue in a single quarter, at this scale, while simultaneously preparing for the scrutiny of public markets.
Why the Numbers Matter
The AI industry's economics have been under intense scrutiny, with investors questioning whether the enormous capital flowing into chips and data centers will produce correspondingly large returns. Anthropic's quarter is the strongest data point yet that at least one lab is converting that compute spend into revenue at a rate that outpaces its costs on an adjusted basis.
The comparison with OpenAI is now unavoidable. OpenAI's $40 billion run rate remains the industry benchmark, but Anthropic's quarterly trajectory — nearly doubling quarter over quarter — shows the gap in momentum may be narrowing faster than most analysts expected.
Whether that growth holds through a public listing process, and how investors value two AI giants whose adjusted profitability is only beginning to emerge, will be one of the defining market stories of the next year.
Stay Ahead of AI
For deep coverage of Anthropic, OpenAI, and the economics of the AI boom, bookmark AI Buzz Wire.
Read more AI news →
