The question preoccupying Anthropic's prospective public investors is no longer whether the company can grow. Anthropic told investors over the weekend that its annualized revenue run rate hit $65 billion at the end of July, a development CNBC confirmed, representing about a sevenfold increase from a year ago. That figure arrived alongside a harder number: Anthropic reported preliminary revenue exceeding $11.5 billion in its most recently completed second quarter, compared with $787 million in the same period in 2025, according to documents seen by Bloomberg News, and the company also reported positive adjusted operating income for the quarter. The sequential acceleration is equally striking. That second-quarter result is more than 14 times what Anthropic generated in the same quarter last year and more than double the $4.73 billion in first-quarter revenue, a sequential increase exceeding 140 percent.
The engine of that growth is enterprise software spending, concentrated in coding tools. Once regarded as an underdog beside higher-profile competitors, the Claude creator has successfully carved out a lucrative niche among enterprise clients and software developers, with demand for its flagship Claude coding models driving consistent enterprise contracts. By comparison, as of the end of July, OpenAI's annualized revenue was about $40 billion, roughly 60 percent of Anthropic's. Investors now project that the company will finish 2026 at a run rate between $100 billion and $120 billion, a figure that would surpass even what SpaceX fetched when it went public at a $1.77 trillion valuation in June.
The profitability headline, however, carries a structural asterisk that skeptics have not overlooked. In May 2026, Anthropic finalized a deal to take over a major share of Colossus-2, SpaceX's next-generation AI supercomputer cluster, at a steady-state cost of $1.25 billion per month; the standard price does not kick in immediately, and Anthropic was paying a reduced ramp-up rate during the initial months of the contract, precisely the quarter in which it is projecting its operating profit. The numbers represent a sharp reversal from financial guidance Anthropic gave investors last summer, which suggested the company did not expect to turn a full-year profit until at least 2028, and Anthropic itself cautioned that it may not sustain profitability for the full year given planned spending increases tied to computing infrastructure. Compute efficiency is, however, improving: in the first quarter, Anthropic spent 71 cents on compute for every dollar of revenue, a ratio expected to fall to 56 cents in the current quarter.
All of this lands inside the most consequential IPO window the company has faced. Anthropic confidentially filed its prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and has been holding preliminary meetings with potential investors. The company is meeting with potential new investors ahead of a planned IPO expected in September or October, according to a source familiar with the matter, with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan working on the offering. The adjusted-income disclosure is the most important data point the confidential S-1 has so far surfaced for public-market underwriters: it suggests the cost-of-revenue curve is bending even as training commitments grow, but it leaves open, for now, whether that bend is durable or the product of a temporary contractual discount that will reverse once the Colossus-2 ramp-up period ends.
The single number that will define Anthropic's IPO pricing is not the run rate but the margin it posts in the first full quarter after the Colossus-2 discount expires.