Anthropic Tells Investors of Second Straight Profitable Quarter

Anthropic has told a small group of shareholders that it will post positive adjusted operating income for the second consecutive quarter, a move aimed at easing investor concerns about the aggressive cash burn that has defined frontier AI companies ahead of its blockbuster initial public offering. The disclosure came as the Claude maker prepares for a listing on Nasdaq that could value it at $2tn or more, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The measure strips out costs including stock-based compensation, and the company’s gross margins exceed 80 per cent before accounting for revenue shared with distribution partners such as Amazon and the cost of training its models.

The profitability milestone is significant for the five-year-old company, which has been at the centre of anxiety about the pace of AI development. Anthropic had been expected to unveil its prospectus last week, but instead shared documents with a small group of investors and will field questions from them before making the documents public. The company declined to comment on the valuation or the listing process.

The financial picture has improved sharply. Anthropic recorded an adjusted operating profit in the second quarter after revenues surged 14-fold from a year earlier to $11.5bn. The group hit annualised revenue of $65bn at the end of July, up from $9bn at the end of last year. Investors are forecasting that Anthropic will end the year with $120bn in annualised revenue and close 2027 with almost triple that, according to Joey Brookhart, an analyst covering AI labs at SemiAnalysis. “If you continue to operate at these margins and growth rates, it will be so hard to compete [with Anthropic] because they have so much [computing resource],” Brookhart said.

The listing comes at a fraught moment for the AI industry, as the blistering pace of development collides with public anxiety over the technology’s impact on everything from the environment and jobs to the future of humanity. On Saturday, Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, called on the AI industry to slow the pace of development. In an essay, Amodei said the industry “must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” amid alarm about the power of new models. His call was echoed by OpenAI boss Sam Altman and SpaceX chief Elon Musk.

Potential investors must now grapple with the implications of intense scrutiny of AI safety, as well as a business model that has yet to be tested on public markets. Attempts to track the trajectory of the business have been complicated by the calls to slow or pause AI development. Doing so could save the company billions of dollars in costs to train new, more advanced models, but it could also allow rivals to close the gap. Altman confirmed to Fortune on Saturday that OpenAI would remain private this year, despite confidentially filing its own IPO paperwork in June. He said that 2026 would be an “ill-advised moment” to go public given the concerns over AI safety.

Employees at the rival labs have been in close communication over recent weeks about instituting measures to safely manage the development of AI, according to people familiar with the talks, which are highly unusual given the fierce competition between the companies. Those private discussions were spurred by recent security breaches, a growing unease among researchers about the capability of new AI models, and a recognition that President Donald Trump was unlikely to put the brakes on the technology. “We are on our own here,” said one employee at a frontier lab.

Sustained profitability would be a major milestone for Anthropic, but it arrives alongside an industry-wide reckoning about the social costs of rapid advancement. The company’s ability to maintain margins while navigating calls for a slower development pace will be the central question for investors weighing the IPO. A profitable quarter offers a measure of financial discipline, yet the broader debate over AI safety means the market’s verdict on Anthropic will be shaped as much by its governance as by its growth.