Anthropic Tells Shareholders It Expects a Second Straight Profitable Quarter, Reportedly Picks Nasdaq for IPO

Anthropic's Q2 2026 revenue hit $11.5 billion, up from $787 million in Q2 2025, and produced the company's first quarter of positive adjusted operating income at $559 million. That result, already public, set the stage for what came next.

On Sunday, the Financial Times reported that Anthropic told a small group of shareholders it expects to post a positive adjusted operating profit again this quarter, marking a second consecutive profitable period as the company prepares to go public. Bloomberg, The Daily Guardian, and BigGo Finance all cited the FT reporting, which was based on people familiar with the matter rather than an Anthropic press release.

According to Bloomberg, Anthropic's gross margins now exceed 80% before accounting for revenue-sharing payments to partners like Amazon.com and the cost of training its AI models. BigGo Finance reported the same 80%-plus figure, citing people familiar with the matter, and added that Anthropic has reportedly selected Nasdaq as its listing venue for an eventual IPO.

The valuation number is murky

BigGo Finance reported that Anthropic is targeting a valuation that "matches or even surpasses" the $86.3 billion fundraising record set by SpaceX. SpaceX's $86.3 billion figure, as cited in that report, was described as a fundraising record, not a company valuation, and other coverage of Anthropic's IPO ambitions has floated valuations in the hundreds of billions of dollars. BigGo Finance did not reconcile the two numbers, and Anthropic has not confirmed either one. The report explicitly noted that "Anthropic has not yet formally responded to the matter."

What's actually driving the Q2 2026 number

Anthropic's Q2 2026 revenue of $11.5 billion beat its own internal projection of $10.9 billion, according to Crypto Briefing and KuCoin, both citing the same underlying figures. That's a jump from $4.73 billion in Q1 2026, a sequential increase that would take most software companies years to pull off.

Anthropic also cut what it spends running its models relative to revenue, from 71 cents to 56 cents per dollar earned, per those same reports. At $11.5 billion in revenue, that 15-cent improvement is worth tens of millions of dollars. The company has locked in multi-year compute agreements with Amazon and Google, which gives it cost predictability that smaller AI labs can't easily match.

For comparison, OpenAI reported $6.7 billion in revenue for the same quarter, according to Crypto Briefing and KuCoin. Anthropic's enterprise-heavy business, built on coding assistance and agentic workflows with multi-year contracts, has now outpaced OpenAI's larger consumer footprint in raw quarterly revenue, even though ChatGPT still has more users.

Amazon holds an equity stake in Anthropic, and Anthropic's strong Q2 performance produced an unrealized gain that showed up in Amazon's own quarterly results, per KuCoin.

The catch nobody should skip

Every one of these profit figures is adjusted operating income, not GAAP net income. Adjusted metrics strip out stock-based compensation and other non-cash charges. That means Anthropic is not necessarily generating cash the way a traditional profitable company does. It's a real signal for a company burning cash at AI-industry rates, but it is not the same thing as a clean income statement, and investors evaluating an eventual S-1 filing will be looking hard at the GAAP numbers when they finally show up.

There's a fair question underneath all of this: is an 80%-plus gross margin, achieved before Amazon's revenue share and model-training costs are even netted out, actually a margin investors should trust as durable? Skeptics of the current AI investment boom would note that enterprise AI spending has not been tested through a recession, and that a handful of massive multi-year contracts can make growth numbers look smoother than the underlying demand really is. Anthropic's own internal projection undershooting actual Q2 revenue by $600 million cuts against that skepticism, but it doesn't erase it.

Anthropic has been floated as a potential IPO candidate as early as October 2026, per Crypto Briefing and KuCoin, though nothing here confirms a filing date. The company has not issued its own statement on the Nasdaq listing report, the valuation target, or the second-quarter profitability claim. Whether Anthropic files an S-1 before year's end and what its actual GAAP numbers look like when it does remains the open question the market is waiting on.