- Anthropic's third-quarter 2026 revenue was $16.8 billion, up from $11.6 billion in the second quarter and $4.7 billion in the first, taking nine-month revenue to roughly $33 billion, according to an investor at the meeting.
- The company described an 85% adjusted gross margin and an adjusted operating margin above 11%, figures that leave out costs such as stock compensation and cannot be checked until audited numbers appear in its public prospectus.
- Investors at the meeting discussed a valuation of $1.8 trillion to $2 trillion, about double the $965 billion Series H price in May, with a listing targeted before Thanksgiving.
Anthropic booked $16.8 billion of revenue in the third quarter of 2026, a 45% rise on the previous quarter, according to figures the company presented to prospective investors at a pre-IPO meeting at its San Francisco headquarters on October 14. The quarter alone brought in more than three times what the Claude maker earned in all of 2025, and the company told investors it was profitable on an adjusted basis for the second quarter running.
Anthropic's revenue grew 45% in a quarter, from a far larger base
The figures came from a closed-door presentation to the funds that will be asked to buy shares, and Anthropic has not published them. An investor who attended gave Reuters the quarterly sequence as $4.7 billion in the first quarter, $11.6 billion in the second and $16.8 billion in the third. Growth has cooled from the more than 100% jump between the first and second quarters, yet the $5.2 billion added in the third quarter is larger than the company's entire 2025 revenue of about $4.6 billion, a figure that surfaced in leaked financials last month.
Run at the third-quarter pace, Anthropic's revenue annualizes to about $67 billion. That is above the nearly $50 billion run rate OpenAI disclosed to investors last week, though the two are hard to compare: Anthropic records some sales made through Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud on a gross basis, which counts revenue that a net method would leave with the cloud provider.
Adjusted profit is the number public investors will test first
| Revenue, Q3 2026 | $16.8 billion |
| Growth on Q2 ($11.6 billion) | 45% |
| Adjusted gross margin | 85% |
| Long-term compute commitments | More than $500 billion |
According to people briefed on the presentation, Anthropic generated about $1.70 of revenue for every dollar it spent on compute in the quarter and produced positive cash flow. Those adjusted measures sit against more than $500 billion of long-term commitments for chips, cloud capacity and data centers, most of them non-cancellable, and a 2025 net loss of about $42 billion that was driven largely by accounting charges on financing instruments.
The $5.2 billion Anthropic added in a single quarter is larger than everything it earned in 2025.
The public prospectus, which US rules require at least 15 days before a roadshow, will be the first audited view of how those adjusted margins are built. If the roadshow starts the week of November 9 as planned, that document should appear within days. Until then, the market is pricing a company on its own unaudited account of a quarter, and the gap between adjusted profit and a GAAP profit is where a $2 trillion valuation will be argued.
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