Anthropic made $11.5 billion last quarter! A year earlier it made $787 million

Anthropic's second-quarter revenue exceeded $11.5 billion. In the same quarter a year earlier it was $787 million.

That is a fourteenfold increase in twelve months, at a scale where such multiples do not normally occur. Companies growing that fast are usually small. Anthropic was not small a year ago.

The Numbers

The annualised run rate reached roughly $65 billion by the end of July, up sharply from where it stood at the close of 2025.

Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in its Series H round in May. It has filed confidentially for a listing, working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, and could begin trading as early as this autumn.

Investor expectations for the offering have reached $2 trillion or higher. If that holds, it would surpass the $1.77 trillion record SpaceX set in June and become the largest initial public offering ever completed.

Backers expect annualised revenue between $100 billion and $120 billion by the end of this year.

One caution on those figures: the valuation expectations come from investors, not from the company. Senior Anthropic executives have not set a public target, and reporting suggests they have not set one privately either. The revenue figures are attributed to people familiar with the finances rather than to audited disclosure, which is normal for a company that has filed confidentially and cannot say much until it doesn't.

It Is Now Ahead Of OpenAI

The comparison that matters is not with SpaceX. It is with the company Anthropic was founded by people who left.

On current revenue generation, Anthropic is reported to be ahead of OpenAI. That is a reversal of the assumption that has governed coverage of this industry since 2022, and it happened without a consumer product anyone would call a household name.

OpenAI, meanwhile, appears to be slowing down. It filed confidentially in June and was reported to be targeting a September listing, then to be weighing a delay into 2027 rather than accept a valuation below $1 trillion. Sam Altman is reported to have treated any cut to that figure as a nonstarter.

So the two companies may arrive at the public markets in the opposite order to the one everyone expected, and for opposite reasons — one accelerating into a receptive market, the other holding back for a number.

Where The Money Is Coming From

The composition of Anthropic's revenue explains the growth better than the headline figure does.

Anthropic sells overwhelmingly to businesses rather than consumers. Enterprise contracts are larger, longer and less volatile than subscriptions, and they expand inside an organisation once the first team adopts them. That is a slower start and a steeper curve, which is close to the shape the numbers show.

It also has a coding business that has become the strongest product-market fit in the industry, at a moment when software development is the single clearest commercial application of these models. Independent assessments of AI coding tools have repeatedly placed Anthropic's offering first.

The risk in that concentration is the obvious one. A business weighted towards enterprise software and coding is exposed to exactly one thing going wrong: a competitor closing the capability gap on code. Google shipped Gemini 3.7 Flash this month with a sixteen-point jump on one agentic coding benchmark in three weeks, at half the blended price of its predecessor.

What An IPO Changes

A listing at this scale converts a private research company into a public one with quarterly obligations, and that is a genuine change in what Anthropic is.

The company has built its identity on safety, on publishing research that complicates its own commercial story, and on a governance structure designed to let it decline revenue. Public markets do not forbid any of that, but they price it. Every decision to slow a release, restrict a capability or spend on alignment research becomes a line an analyst can question on a call.

There is a live example. An assessment published this week graded five frontier labs on their internal AI control practices, and Anthropic scored zero on having a published plan for containing a model that escapes control — the lowest possible mark, on the one measure most directly tied to its public identity.

That gap existed while the company was private and answerable to nobody but its own board. It is harder to explain from a stock exchange.

The Number To Watch

Fourteenfold growth is the figure that will lead coverage, and it is real. But the one that determines whether the valuation holds is the $100 billion to $120 billion the backers expect by December.

That requires the run rate to rise by more than half again in five months. If it lands, the $2 trillion conversation is defensible on any normal revenue multiple. If it stalls at $65 billion, a company priced at thirty times revenue on the promise of continued acceleration becomes a considerably harder story to tell to public shareholders than to private ones.