Anthropic's revenue more than doubled to over $11.5 billion in the second quarter of 2026, according to reports from Bloomberg, Reuters and CNBC — a surge that lands just weeks before the company is expected to pursue one of the largest technology IPOs in history.

The quarterly figure, first reported by Bloomberg late on Friday and detailed further by Reuters and CNBC, marks a jump from roughly $4.73 billion in the first quarter. Reuters, citing people familiar with the matter, described the result as roughly a 14-fold increase year over year, making Anthropic one of the fastest-growing businesses in the history of software. For more context on this story, see our ongoing breaking AI news.

The forecast at the heart of the IPO

A Reuters exclusive published on Saturday added the most consequential detail: Anthropic's IPO valuation hinges on a revenue forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion for 2028. Investors asked to buy shares in the listing will effectively be underwriting a business that is projected to multiply its top line by more than tenfold again within two years.

To put that trajectory in perspective, Anthropic shared an annualized revenue run rate of about $45 billion as recently as May. The company has previously said it grew revenue by more than 10 times in each of the three years leading up to early 2026 — and the second-quarter results suggest that pace has, if anything, accelerated.

According to The Decoder, which aggregated the Reuters and Wall Street Journal reporting, Anthropic plans to go public at a valuation near $1 trillion in late September or early October. If the listing reaches that mark, it would rank among the largest technology debuts ever attempted.

Premium pricing, premium revenue

The growth is striking given Anthropic's pricing strategy. Claude models are consistently among the most expensive frontier APIs on the market, prompting TechRadar this week to dub the company "the Apple of AI" — a business that captures the most revenue in its category despite charging the highest prices.

The comparison cuts both ways. Apple-grade margins attract imitators, and Anthropic now faces fierce competition on price from open-weight model providers and from rivals including OpenAI, Google and xAI. DeepSeek and Meta's open models have pushed inference costs sharply lower at the commodity end of the market, even as Anthropic's enterprise and coding customers continue to pay a premium for Claude.

Not everyone is convinced the fundamentals justify the valuation. Fortune argued on Friday that Anthropic has a "$2 trillion problem": its underlying business, while growing explosively, is still nowhere near the IPO valuation the company is said to be targeting. The publication noted that even the bullish 2028 forecast implies investors are paying an enormous multiple on current revenue.

There are also early signals that enterprise consumption may not grow in a straight line forever. Payments processor Ramp recently measured a slight flattening in demand for Anthropic tokens among its business customers — a tentative data point, but one that IPO skeptics are likely to cite.

A stress test for the AI bubble debate

The revenue disclosure landed at a pointed moment in the AI investment debate. On the same day, the Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia has cut its planned guarantee for OpenAI's data center build-out from $250 billion to just under $120 billion after investor pushback over risk exposure.

The two stories pull the AI narrative in opposite directions. One of the industry's most important suppliers is trimming its financial commitments under pressure from shareholders, even as its most successful customer is compounding revenue faster than almost any software business in history. As The Decoder put it, Anthropic's numbers "push in the opposite direction" of bubble warnings.

For IPO investors, the tension is the whole question. If Anthropic's 2028 forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion proves accurate, the current growth rate more than justifies a trillion-dollar price tag. If demand flattens the way Ramp's token data hints it might, the listing could become the moment the market re-prices the entire AI sector.

What to watch

Several milestones in the coming weeks will shape the outcome:

  • The IPO filing. Reuters reports the listing is planned for late September or early October, meaning an S-1 could become public within weeks.
  • Q3 revenue. After a quarter in which revenue more than doubled sequentially, even flat sequential growth would be read as a warning sign by some analysts.
  • Competitor moves. The Financial Times reported on Saturday that OpenAI is readying its own IPO push amid internal upheaval, setting up a potential race to the public markets between the two most valuable AI startups.
  • Token demand data. Third-party spending trackers like Ramp will be watched closely for confirmation or contradiction of the flattening trend.

What is not in dispute is the scale of what Anthropic has built in three years. A company founded in 2021 is now generating more than $11.5 billion in a single quarter, with a public listing that could value it alongside the largest corporations in the world. Whether that is the marker of a durable new industry — or the peak of one — will be decided in the next two quarters.

Sources: Reuters, Bloomberg, CNBC, Fortune, TechRadar, The Decoder.

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