Anthropic tells investors third-quarter revenue rose 45% to $16.8 billion before a planned November listing

According to the Financial Times, as summarized by AI Post, Anthropic generated $16.8 billion in revenue in the third quarter and was profitable on an adjusted basis for the second quarter in a row. SiliconANGLE reports that the 45% growth is quarter over quarter. Executives presented the figures to investors at the company's San Francisco headquarters as it prepares for a possible initial public offering (IPO) in November.

The figures that matter most for valuation concern unit economics. Anthropic told investors it was cash-flow positive and earned $1.70 in revenue for every $1 spent on compute in the quarter. The same reporting says growth is slowing from earlier in the year and that annualized revenue is expected to land below the closely watched $100 billion mark.

The listing price itself is under debate. Earlier reporting said Anthropic could begin formal marketing as soon as the week of November 9 and list before Thanksgiving on November 26, with prospective investors putting fair value at $1.8 trillion to $2 trillion. Since then, some current and prospective investors have discussed roughly $1.5 trillion instead. The research firm New Constructs has argued the company is worth $150 billion. That same coverage lists the pressures on Anthropic: OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra regaining enterprise traction, price pressure from Chinese and Meta open-weight models, rising infrastructure costs, and safety incidents involving AI agents.

A Russian-language AI channel summed up the competitive picture with the line "Where is Qwen? Where is Kimi? Anthropic had too good a quarter". Coding and enterprise revenue have so far gone mostly to closed US labs, even as open-weight Chinese models win on benchmarks and price.