Anthropic Heads Toward $2 Trillion IPO as Revenue Growth Slows

Anthropic is reported to have brought in $1.70 in revenue for every $1 of computing power it paid for in the third quarter. The AI firm presented that metric to investors weeks ahead of its planned November IPO.

The quarter's revenue came in 50% higher at $16.8 billion, and Anthropic logged a second straight adjusted profit. Growth had been faster in earlier months, however, with revenue more than doubling from the first quarter to the second.

Anthropic's Compute Economics Have Reversed in a Year

The figures were reported by the Financial Times. Executives, for their part, put operating margins at 11% and described Anthropic as cash flow positive.

That marks a reversal from last year. In 2025, compute spending stood at $7.33 billion versus revenue of about $4.6 billion, which translates to roughly $0.63 in revenue for every $1 spent on compute.

Operating losses exceeded $8 billion in 2025 after excluding write-downs largely connected to earlier fundraising. BeInCrypto noted that Anthropic's adjusted profit for the second quarter excluded stock-based pay and that the 80% gross margin omitted training costs.

Why Is Anthropic's Growth Slowing Ahead of Its IPO?

Revenue, meanwhile, rose to $16.8 billion from $11.5 billion in the second quarter and from around $4.8 billion in the first quarter. Estimates of how Anthropic will finish the year have been pared back as well.

During the summer, a number of investors predicted to the FT that annualized revenue would top $100 billion by the end of the year. Now, researcher SemiAnalysis sees around $74 billion, compared with $65 billion at the end of July.

The report identified multiple growth pressures.

• Customers turning to internal models: Two large Anthropic clients, Meta and Microsoft, increasingly rely on AI models built internally.
• Less distillation: Anthropic has also cut back on distillation, the process by which rival labs train on a stronger model's outputs. According to four people who spoke to the FT, that paid usage accounted for 5% to 7% of revenue.
• Price competition: Both Anthropic and OpenAI have reduced prices amid pressure from low-cost Chinese labs. This month, Anthropic priced Claude Haiku 5.5 around 75% lower than the previous version.

At the investor event, CEO Dario Amodei and CFO Krishna Rao nonetheless stressed margins and profitability. They cautioned that those numbers may shift as Anthropic makes heavy investments in compute and biomedical research.

Those commitments are already in place. Anthropic has pledged at least $518 billion over a decade for cloud services, computing and infrastructure. As the FT reported, higher interest rates could delay the plans.

The offering is reportedly headed by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and is targeting a valuation north of $2 trillion. For now, the pitch depends on numbers that were shared with investors in private.