Anthropic told IPO investors it made $16.8 billion in three months, but its growth is cooling

Anthropic brought in $16.8 billion in revenue between July and September, the company told would-be investors at a pre-IPO meeting at its San Francisco headquarters on Wednesday, the Financial Times reported. That is up about 45% on the previous quarter, and more than three times what the Claude maker took in during the whole of 2025.

Anthropic hasn’t published the figures and hasn’t commented on them publicly. They come from the investor presentation, as described by people who attended it, and Bloomberg, CNBC and Reuters have reported the same revenue number. None of it is audited yet: the full numbers should appear in Anthropic’s public S-1 filing ahead of a listing expected in November.

A year’s revenue in a quarter, several times over

The jump caps a steep climb. Anthropic’s IPO paperwork showed revenue of nearly $4.6 billion for all of 2025. It then made just under $5 billion in the first three months of 2026 and about $11.5 billion in the second quarter, according to the figures reported on Wednesday (CNBC put the second quarter at $11.6 billion).

Chief executive Dario Amodei and chief financial officer Krishna Rao walked investors through the numbers, along with the company’s growth plans and its approach to AI safety. CNBC had reported on Tuesday that it would be the first time Anthropic disclosed third-quarter results to potential investors.

Profitable, on Anthropic’s own measure

Anthropic told investors it was profitable on an adjusted basis for the second quarter in a row, with an adjusted operating margin of 11%, according to the FT. It also said it was cash-flow positive in the quarter and earned $1.70 in revenue for every dollar it spent on computing power.

Those are company figures using the company’s own definitions, and the cash-flow number itself wasn’t shared. Its prospectus showed a $42 billion net loss for 2025 and $518 billion in long-term commitments for cloud computing and infrastructure, most of which it has to pay whether it uses the capacity or not.

Slower than some investors hoped

A 45% rise in three months would be extraordinary for almost any company, but it is a sharp slowdown from the second quarter, when revenue more than doubled. The FT reported that the figures fell short of what some backers had expected, with several anticipating annualised revenue of more than $100 billion by the end of the year.

Research firm SemiAnalysis estimated Anthropic’s annualised revenue at about $74 billion based on the new numbers, the FT said. Reuters, citing a person at the presentation, reported that Anthropic expects to reach an annualised run rate of $110 billion by the end of the year. Neither figure has been confirmed by the company.

Big customers and copycats

Some of the slowdown comes from customers Anthropic once relied on. The FT reported that Meta and Microsoft, both major Anthropic customers, have moved more of their own work to in-house AI tools.

Anthropic also told investors that distillation, where other developers train their own models on Claude’s answers, had made up 5% to 7% of its revenue, and that it cut that business back materially in the third quarter. It comes days after the company said its new defences leave copycat labs with up to 99% less from Claude’s reasoning. Competition from OpenAI and cheaper Chinese models remains the other pressure on prices.

For anyone weighing up the listing itself, our guide to Anthropic’s $2 trillion IPO covers the timing, the bull and bear case and how to buy shares.

Why it matters

Anthropic is asking public markets for a valuation of more than $2 trillion, and these are the numbers it chose to lead with: huge revenue, adjusted profits and better returns on its computing bill. The slowdown shows how much of that price rests on growth continuing, and the audited S-1 will be the first chance to check the company’s claims.

Sources: Financial Times; Bloomberg; CNBC (Q3 revenue, investor meeting); Reuters.