Anthropic generated more than $11.5 billion in preliminary second-quarter revenue, a more than 14-fold increase from a year earlier, as the Claude developer moves closer to a potential initial public offering that could become one of the largest technology listings on record.
The artificial-intelligence company's second-quarter sales were up from $787 million a year earlier and more than doubled from $4.73 billion in the first quarter of 2026. Bloomberg News reported that Anthropic also posted positive adjusted operating income for the period, though the financial results remain preliminary and could change.
The acceleration puts Anthropic in a stronger position as it begins courting prospective public-market investors. Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao has been holding early discussions with potential investors ahead of a possible IPO as soon as this fall, CNBC previously reported.
Those conversations have remained preliminary and haven't included a proposed valuation or detailed financial disclosures. But the latest results provide investors with a clearer indication of the scale Anthropic has reached as demand for generative AI spreads through corporate technology budgets.
The company's recent growth can be summarized by several figures:
- Second-quarter 2026 preliminary revenue: More than $11.5 billion
- Second-quarter 2025 revenue: $787 million
- First-quarter 2026 revenue: $4.73 billion
- 2025 actual revenue: Roughly $10 billion
- May 2026 annualized revenue run rate: More than $47 billion
- 2028 revenue forecast: Roughly $190 billion to $200 billion
- May private-market valuation: $965 billion
Anthropic's expansion has been driven heavily by enterprise customers and Claude Code, its AI software-development product. Corporate adoption has given the company a strong foothold in professional applications, where customers can generate substantial recurring usage as AI models become integrated into software development and other business processes.
That strength is also intensifying Anthropic's competition with OpenAI. Both companies are attempting to demonstrate that rapidly rising demand for their models can eventually justify the enormous investments required to train and operate advanced AI systems.
For Anthropic, the reported move into positive adjusted operating income could become an important part of that pitch. Revenue growth alone doesn't answer one of the biggest questions facing generative-AI companies: whether the economics of providing increasingly compute-intensive models can produce durable profits after accounting for infrastructure, chips, data centers and talent.
The company's forecasts suggest executives expect the current expansion to continue at an unusually rapid pace. Reuters reported that Anthropic is projecting roughly $190 billion to $200 billion in revenue in 2028 and expects annualized revenue to reach approximately $100 billion to $120 billion by the end of this year.
Those figures aren't equivalent to booked annual revenue. Annualized run rate extrapolates the company's current sales pace over a full year, making it particularly sensitive to periods of rapid growth. Still, such projections are likely to feature prominently as bankers and investors attempt to establish an IPO valuation.
Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in a private funding round in May, according to Reuters. A public offering near that level would force investors to decide whether the company's projected growth warrants a valuation approaching $1 trillion while it continues spending heavily on computing capacity, model development and employees.
