Anthropic booked more than $11.5 billion in second-quarter revenue, a 14-fold jump from the $787 million it posted a year earlier, according to internal documents seen by Bloomberg and separately confirmed by a person briefed on the figures who spoke to The Information. Q1 2026 came in at $4.73 billion. The Wall Street Journal had projected the quarter would roughly double to $10.9 billion. It didn’t double. It roughly tripled.

The number lands with the timing of a company that knows what its number needs to do. Six backers told the Financial Times that Anthropic is targeting an October IPO at a $2 trillion valuation, with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan running the book. That would eclipse SpaceX and rank as the largest stock offering ever recorded. OpenAI, the reference comparable, isn’t expected to list until 2027.

Q2 also produced Anthropic’s first-ever positive adjusted operating income, the metric IPO narratives are built on. The word doing the work there’s “adjusted.” Avery Marquez, an analyst at Renaissance Capital, points out that operating profit isn’t net income; interest and taxes still eat into the frontier-lab bill. For Nasdaq 100-style multiples, Marquez estimates you’d need annual profits between $59 billion and $79 billion. That’s a different postal code from anything the AI sector currently produces.

Investors telling the FT expect Anthropic to hit a $100 billion to $120 billion annualized run rate by year-end. One argued a 30-times-revenue multiple would justify a $3 trillion valuation. Anthropic’s top Claude model is already priced more than 2.5 times above OpenAI’s flagship, which the bull case reads as pricing power and the bear case reads as a ceiling.

The headwinds are real and legible. June growth slowed after a temporary U.S. Commerce Department export control. The company is in active litigation with the Defense Department, which named it a supply-chain risk earlier this year. None of it, so far, is being permitted to interrupt the narrative arriving on schedule for October.

Sources