Anthropic told investors its annualized revenue run rate hit $65 billion by the end of July, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to Bloomberg News, a sevenfold jump from the roughly $9 billion pace it was running at the close of 2025. The figure lands two months after the Claude maker filed a confidential prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission and roughly six weeks before an expected September or October debut on the public markets.

The trajectory is remarkable even by the standards of the current AI capital cycle. Anthropic’s run rate was $47 billion in May. Preliminary second-quarter revenue exceeded $11.5 billion, up from $787 million in the same quarter of 2025, a fourteenfold increase, and internal documents seen by Bloomberg show positive adjusted operating income for the period. First-quarter revenue was $4.73 billion, per TechCrunch.

Investors, according to a Financial Times report cited by TechCrunch and Fortune, now expect Anthropic to book somewhere between $100 billion and $120 billion in 2026 revenue. Reuters reported Friday that the company is projecting 2028 revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion, and that the IPO valuation will hinge on those forecasts. Fortune reports Anthropic intends to seek a valuation of $2 trillion or more, more than double the $965 billion it received in May after raising $65 billion in a Series H round.

Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are working on the offering, CNBC reported, with preliminary meetings already underway with potential new investors.

The comparison that matters is with OpenAI, which Bloomberg reported last week has reached a $40 billion run rate of its own, up from $20 billion at the end of 2025. Bloomberg cautions that the two firms may not calculate the metric identically. Even allowing for that, the ordering has flipped: the challenger is now, on paper, the larger business, and TechCrunch notes Anthropic’s growth curve has drawn markedly more investor interest.

There’s a structural echo here of the 1999 Netscape-to-Google handoff era, when a second-mover with cleaner enterprise economics quietly overtook the incumbent narrative before either had a stable public market. OpenAI and DeepSeek are also preparing offerings, per Fortune; a fall Anthropic debut would put it on public markets ahead of both. Anthropic declined to comment.

Whichever firm prices first sets the anchor everyone else gets marked against. That’s the prize.

Sources