Anthropic's revenue hit $16.8B before its IPO

Anthropic doesn't normally share its numbers. On Oct. 14, it did anyway. At a closed-door meeting with investors in San Francisco, the AI company said its revenue hit $16.8 billion last quarter. That's up 45% from the quarter before. CEO Dario Amodei and CFO Krishna Rao delivered the news themselves, ahead of Anthropic's own plans to go public.

Anthropic has mostly stayed quiet about money. It's spent enormous sums on chips and computing power instead. Investors have been nervous about whether any AI company actually earns back what it spends. A $16.8 billion quarter, growing 45% from the one before, is Anthropic's answer to that doubt. The company also called itself profitable. That's only true on an adjusted basis — a number companies can define favorably. It's not the stricter standard accounting investors usually expect.

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Will Anthropic's actual IPO price match this momentum? Investors just saw real growth, not just a lab doing impressive research. But adjusted profit numbers are a company's own framing of its finances, not an independently audited one. Anthropic hasn't set a share price or a date yet. Whether the rest of this quarter's strength survives contact with public markets and real auditors is the test still ahead.