Anthropic Told Investors Q3 Revenue Hit $16.8 Billion, Up About 45%, With Growth Slowing Ahead of November IPO

Since Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1, its finances have surfaced in pieces, and an investor meeting on Wednesday added the third-quarter numbers.

Anthropic told investors it took in $16.8 billion in revenue from July through September. That is up about 45% to 46% from roughly $11.5 billion to $11.6 billion in the second quarter. First-quarter revenue was about $4.7 billion.

The company also said it was profitable on an adjusted basis for a second straight quarter and cash-flow positive. A company spokesperson declined to comment to Business Insider.

What Anthropic told investors

Per Bloomberg's reporting, citing people familiar with the meeting, the adjusted operating margin was about 11%. The Financial Times reported that Anthropic generated $1.70 in revenue for every dollar spent on computing power in the quarter. Bloomberg also reported an 85% gross margin.

The Financial Times reported one more detail: model distillation, where developers train their own systems on another model's outputs, contributed 5% to 7% of Anthropic's revenue before the company materially cut it in the third quarter.

None of these figures come from a public filing. Business Insider noted it is unclear whether the $16.8 billion counts gross or net revenue. Anthropic has historically counted gross sales through cloud partners as revenue, even though it does not keep the full amount. Nor has the company said how it defines "adjusted" profitability.

Growth is still huge, but it is slowing

Revenue more than doubled from the first quarter to the second. The jump to the third was about 45%.

SemiAnalysis puts annualized revenue at about $74 billion, up from about $65 billion in late July. Euronews reported that the year-end run rate is now expected to land below $100 billion. The Wall Street Journal reported that investors had expected about $110 billion.

Harrison Rolfes, a private company analyst at PitchBook, told Business Insider the company is "still growing, but not growing as fast. So they're reaching this inflection point." He said the deceleration could "shave" the valuation Anthropic can seek, and that the numbers do not show how much it spends to generate the revenue.

There is a more bullish way to read the same quarter. PitchBook's own valuation note in Morningstar measures a $2 trillion price against the July run rate, which puts it at just under 31 times annualized sales. Against 2025 revenue of nearly $4.6 billion it is about 435 times. That note says the multiple depends on continued growth and margin improvement that the reported financials do not yet establish.

The loss figures

The draft prospectus, as reported by Reuters on Sept. 28, shows a 2025 net loss of about $42 billion. About $34 billion of that is a non-cash remeasurement of convertible notes, which rose in value as Anthropic's own valuation climbed. The operating loss was $8.06 billion. Compute and infrastructure spending was $7.33 billion, more than the year's revenue.

Crypto Briefing reported today, Oct. 20, that a draft S-1 shows an $80.7 billion net loss for the first half of 2026 on $16.3 billion in revenue. It attributed the loss mainly to non-cash charges tied to the rising valuation. That figure has not been confirmed by Anthropic, which has not made the prospectus public.

PitchBook's analysts expect the charge to grow before the notes convert. Amazon, a noteholder, marked its Anthropic notes at $42.2 billion on March 31 and $97.9 billion on June 30. That is a $55.7 billion increase in one quarter.

The spending commitments

The draft lists at least $518 billion in cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations over about a decade, with six partners. About 80% is non-cancellable. Crypto Briefing said recent reports suggest the total could top $600 billion.

That is the exposure behind the Q3 margin figures. A company that owes that much over ten years needs revenue to keep climbing, and the latest quarter shows the climb getting slower.

The IPO

Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation in May. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are reportedly leading the offering. The company is aiming to list in November, after the U.S. midterm elections, at a valuation of up to $2 trillion. That would top the roughly $1.8 trillion at which SpaceX priced its IPO in June.

The next concrete test is the public S-1. Once Anthropic posts it, the Q3 revenue definition, the gross margin, the adjusted-profit methodology and the size of the 2026 remeasurement charge can be checked against a filed document instead of investor-meeting accounts.