Anthropic reportedly earned $1.70 in revenue for every $1 it spent on computing power in the third quarter. The artificial intelligence (AI) company shared the figure with investors weeks before its planned November initial public offering (IPO).
Revenue rose 50% to $16.8 billion in the quarter, alongside a second straight adjusted profit. However, revenue grew faster earlier this year, more than doubling between the first and second quarters.
Anthropic’s Compute Math Flips in a Year
The Financial Times reported the figures. Executives also put operating margins at 11% and said Anthropic was cash flow positive.
The ratio stands in contrast to last year. In 2025, Anthropic spent $7.33 billion on compute against about $4.6 billion in revenue. That works out to roughly $0.63 in revenue for every $1 of compute.
Its operating loss topped $8 billion that year, excluding write-downs mostly tied to earlier fundraising. Anthropic’s second-quarter adjusted profit excluded stock-based pay, while its 80% gross margin left out training costs, BeInCrypto reported.
Why Is Anthropic’s Growth Cooling Before Its IPO?
Meanwhile, revenue climbed to $16.8 billion from $11.5 billion in the second quarter and about $4.8 billion in the first. Forecasts for where Anthropic ends the year have come down alongside it.
Over the summer, some investors told the FT that annualized revenue would pass $100 billion by year-end. Research firm SemiAnalysis now projects roughly $74 billion, up from $65 billion at the end of July.
The report pointed to several pressures on growth.
- Customers building in-house: Two large Anthropic clients, Meta and Microsoft, now lean more on AI models they develop themselves.
- A distillation cutback: Anthropic also reduced distillation, where rival labs train their models on a stronger model’s outputs. That paid usage made up 5% to 7% of revenue, four people told the FT.
- A price war: Anthropic and OpenAI have both lowered prices as low-cost Chinese labs add pressure. Anthropic priced Claude Haiku 5.5 about 75% below its predecessor this month.
Even so, Chief Executive Dario Amodei and Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao highlighted margins and profitability at the investor event. They also warned those figures could change as Anthropic invests heavily in compute and biomedical research.
That spending is already on the books. Anthropic has committed at least $518 billion over a decade to cloud services, computing, and infrastructure. Rising interest rates could slow those plans, the FT noted.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley reportedly lead the offering, which targets a valuation above $2 trillion. So far, that pitch rests on figures shared privately with investors.
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