Startups

Anthropic's revenue run rate hits $65 billion as it races OpenAI to a fall IPO

The Claude maker's annualized revenue jumped sevenfold from year-end 2025, days after it disclosed $11.5 billion in Q2 revenue and its first quarter of positive adjusted operating income.

By Giulia Donatello · Startups & funding · 2026-08-19 · 3 min read

Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate topped $65 billion by the end of July, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg on August 17, more than seven times the $9 billion pace the Claude maker was on at the end of 2025. The company shared the figures as part of a regular update with investors, and it did so weeks before a planned fall IPO that would put it on public markets ahead of OpenAI.

The curve is close to vertical. The run rate stood at $47 billion in May before jumping to $65 billion in July. Investors now expect Anthropic to close 2026 somewhere between $100 billion and $120 billion, per the Financial Times.

The operating story underneath is arguably the bigger tell. Preliminary Q2 revenue came in above $11.5 billion, up from $4.73 billion in Q1 and $787 million in the same quarter of 2025, according to documents seen by Bloomberg and reported by CNBC on August 15. Q2 was also Anthropic’s first quarter of positive adjusted operating income, which is the number bankers will hand to public-market investors who’ve spent two years being told frontier AI is a cash-incineration business.

Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase are running the offering. Backers expect a $2 trillion valuation when it prices in October.

That number only reads as sane against the peer set. Bloomberg reported last week that OpenAI’s run rate doubled to $40 billion from $20 billion at the end of 2025, and DeepSeek is preparing to file as soon as this year. Non-SPAC listings have raised $256.4 billion in 2026, the most since 2021, and a meaningful share of that capacity is being reserved for a handful of AI issuers.

The framing worth holding onto is sequencing. Anthropic isn’t going public because it has to; it’s going first because going first is the position. The TARP-era investment banks that shepherded the 2008–2010 crisis-era listings understood the same dynamic: whoever prints the tape sets the comparables everyone else trades against. Filing before OpenAI is the whole trade.

Sources