Anthropic's Revenue More Than Doubles in Three Months: First Profitable Quarter Arrives
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Anthropic is set to close the current quarter with its first operational profit in its history. The figures, shared with a group of investors during the ongoing funding round, indicate $10.9 billion in revenue for the quarter ending in June, compared to $4.8 billion in the first quarter of 2026, and an estimated operational profit of $559 million. This would be the first profitable quarter since the company was founded in 2021.
The numbers were quickly confirmed by Bloomberg and CNBC, both through sources close to the matter. Revenue for the second quarter alone would exceed that of the entire year of 2025, which stood around $10 billion.
A Trajectory That Surpasses Zoom During the Pandemic
The most significant data, beyond the absolute value, is the growth rate: revenue has more than doubled in three months, and the Wall Street Journal notes that Anthropic's quarterly growth now surpasses that of Zoom during the pandemic and that of Google and Facebook in comparable stages before their respective IPOs. This is a stark reversal from the estimates the company itself provided to investors last summer when annual profit was not expected until at least 2028.
The push comes from programming tools. Enterprise demand for Claude Code has been the main driver of growth, accompanied by accelerated adoption of Claude across various sectors for agent commerce activities. Last month, during a developer conference, CEO Dario Amodei described the growth rate as "too hard to handle."
It should be noted that the operational profit figure includes training costs of the models but excludes stock-based compensation: an accounting choice that analysts will weigh in view of a potential listing.
Compute Efficiency and Comparisons with OpenAI
Another factor behind profitability is the efficiency in spending on computing power. In the first quarter, Anthropic spent 71 cents on compute for every dollar of revenue, while the estimate for the current quarter drops to 56 cents. The Wall Street Journal attributes the improvement to two specific choices: Amodei's company primarily relies on chips from Google and Amazon instead of Nvidia and has made smaller spending commitments on data centers compared to OpenAI. It also matters that Claude has a significantly lower number of free consumer users than ChatGPT, reducing the implicit subsidy that weighs on its rival's accounts.
The comparison with OpenAI is the subtext of the entire affair. Sam Altman's company does not expect to reach profitability before 2029 or 2030.
Both companies are preparing for an IPO: OpenAI could go public as early as September, while the projected window for Anthropic is October. However, there is an explicit warning accompanying the numbers to investors: Anthropic does not expect to remain profitable in the following quarters, as it plans a substantial increase in infrastructure spending and other cost items. The funding round currently under discussion, according to reports from the Financial Times and CNBC, could take the company's valuation beyond $900 billion, surpassing the $852 billion assigned to OpenAI in March. The cash will be precisely used to cover the compute expenses that will make it challenging to replicate the results of the current quarter.