Key Takeaways:
Anthropic's revenue grew 5x in six months, a pace Menlo Ventures' Matt Murphy calls unprecedented in 25 years of tech investing.
Anthropic's annualized revenue hit $47 billion by May, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025, as enterprise adoption of its Claude models and coding assistant Claude Code accelerated faster than any prior technology cycle. The company, which filed a confidential S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1, is targeting an October initial public offering with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase as lead underwriters.
"It's the kind of growth I've never seen in 25 years — not in the internet wave, not in mobile, not in the first cloud boom," Murphy, a partner at Menlo Ventures, said. "This is a different order of magnitude."
The revenue trajectory is striking even by AI industry standards. Anthropic's run rate crossed $30 billion in April, then jumped to $47 billion by late May, according to the company. Claude Code, its agentic coding tool, had already reached $2.5 billion in annualized revenue by February. OpenAI, by comparison, reported an annualized run rate of roughly $25 billion by early 2026, according to Fortune. Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H funding round in May at a $965 billion post-money valuation, surpassing OpenAI's valuation for the first time.
How Anthropic Outpaced the Competition
The growth has been fueled by enterprises standardizing on Claude for coding, customer service and document analysis workloads. Anthropic's infrastructure spending has kept pace: the company is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for compute capacity at its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, according to SpaceX's prospectus. Total compute spending in 2026 is estimated at roughly $19 billion, with gross margins around 40%. The company does not expect to reach profitability until 2028.
Anthropic has also locked in multi-gigawatt compute agreements with Amazon, Google and Broadcom, and is in preliminary talks with Meta, as CNBC previously reported. Amazon alone has secured up to 5 gigawatts of Trainium commitment from Anthropic as part of its roughly $200 billion 2026 capital expenditure plan, according to Appaloosa Management's David Tepper's latest 13F filing.
The competitive dynamics are shifting. Kalshi prediction markets put the probability of Anthropic listing before OpenAI at 72%, after OpenAI pushed its own IPO target from fall 2026 to 2027, according to CNBC. SpaceX's June IPO — the year's first blockbuster AI-adjacent listing — saw more than 500 million shares trade on day one, the second-heaviest first-day IPO volume in Nasdaq history.
The Risks Ahead
The story is not without complications. The Pentagon designated Anthropic as a supply-chain risk earlier this year, according to the BBC, a designation that has not derailed enterprise momentum but creates an overhang for public market investors. Analysts have also flagged that the $47 billion annualized figure may include committed contract value not yet recognized as revenue, according to the Under the Market Lens Substack — a distinction that matters when public investors value the company on actual reported revenue.
Anthropic's confidential prospectus, filed with Wilson Sonsini — the law firm that managed Google's 2004 IPO — will need to address both issues directly during roadshow meetings with institutional investors now being scheduled by the lead underwriters.
For investors who have watched Nvidia's market cap approach $5 trillion and the Magnificent Three (SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI) dominate IPO conversations, Anthropic represents the first direct opportunity to own the AI model layer at scale. Nvidia gives investors the chips. Microsoft and Google give them the platforms. Anthropic would give them the model company itself — the one building the AI that enterprise clients are increasingly choosing over alternatives. At a $965 billion pre-IPO valuation and roughly 20x trailing revenue, the question is whether the market will pay a premium for a company still burning cash at scale, or wait for a better entry point after the hype settles.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
