London, 15 October 2026 — EBM Newsdesk Analysis — By Anthony Gill
Anthropic told investors at a closed meeting in San Francisco that its revenue reached $16.8bn in the third quarter, up from $11.5bn in the three months before, a rise of about 46%. The Claude maker also said it was cash-flow positive and profitable on an adjusted basis for a second straight quarter. The surprise is that the figures still disappointed some backers. Revenue more than doubled between the first and second quarters, so 46% is a slowdown, and it arrives weeks before what could be the largest listing in history.
For European investors, the numbers matter beyond Silicon Valley. A $2tn listing would pull capital from every major index fund, and the timing is awkward. Asian chip stocks crashed yesterday on fears that higher interest rates will make the AI boom harder to pay for. Anthropic is asking the market to believe in that boom at the exact moment the market is losing its nerve.
The Numbers That Impress
The efficiency figure is the headline. Anthropic says it now earns $1.70 in revenue for every dollar it spends on computing power. In 2025 it earned about 63 cents per dollar, bringing in roughly $4.6bn of revenue against $7.33bn of compute spending.
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SubscribeThat is a dramatic turnaround. Its reported operating margin is 11%, against an operating loss of more than $8bn last year. Few companies have moved from heavy losses to profit this quickly at this scale.
There are caveats. The adjusted profit excludes stock-based pay, and the 80% gross margin reportedly excludes the cost of training models. Chief executive Dario Amodei and finance chief Krishna Rao warned that margins could shift as spending on compute rises, and the company has committed at least $518bn to computing and infrastructure over a decade. Its prospectus already admits the scale of the risks.
The Numbers That Worry
Growth is cooling for three reasons. Big customers including Meta and Microsoft increasingly use their own models. Anthropic cut off distillation business, where others train on its outputs, which reportedly made up 5% to 7% of revenue. And a price war is under way: this month it launched Claude Haiku 5.5 at about 75% below the cost of its predecessor, matching OpenAI’s cheapest model.
SemiAnalysis now expects an annualised revenue run-rate of about $74bn by year-end. Some investors had talked of $100bn this summer. The gap matters because that $100bn figure underpinned much of the valuation talk.
Rates add a further problem. The Google chip machine and other compute deals rely on cheap capital, and the global bond sell-off has made that capital dearer.
What I Think
Anthropic is a real business now, which is more than could be said a year ago. That is what was missing in May, when its funding round put it ahead of OpenAI.
But $2tn is a price for perfection, and 46% growth with falling prices is not perfection. If the listing goes ahead in November, I expect the bankers to trim the target. They should. A cheaper float that trades up would do more for Anthropic than a record that sinks.
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