Anthropic reports $16.8B Q3 revenue, up 46%, ahead of a November IPO at a $2 trillion valuation

Anthropic's Q3 numbers show unusually steep growth for a company of its size. Revenue reached $16.8 billion, up 46% from $11.5 billion in Q2, and the company was adjusted-profitable for the second quarter in a row. It told investors it could exit the year at a $110 billion annualized run rate. The figures arrive just before a November IPO, led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, that is reportedly targeting a valuation around $2 trillion.

One detail drew particular attention. Anthropic reportedly told investors that distillation, meaning other labs paying for API output to train their own models, accounted for 5-7% of revenue. Simon Willison did the math: on Q2's $11.5B, that is more than half a billion dollars spent by competitors to distill Claude. The figure is awkward on two fronts. It is revenue Anthropic earns while arming rivals, and a clampdown on distillation would cost it real money.

Demand is driven mainly by enterprise use of Claude, especially Claude Code and agent workloads, plus security products. A widely shared r/artificial post claims Anthropic's Mythos found so many software flaws that Bank of America hired 1,000 contractors to fix them. The company is also expanding its Cyber Verification Program and opening new STEM and Conceptual Reasoning Fellowships that pay about $3,850 a week.

The skeptics: Ethan Mollick warned that hypergrowth labs 'are not immune from the inevitable politics, dysfunction and confusion that haunt fast-growing firms'. 'Adjusted' profitability excludes items an S-1 will force into the open. The prospectus, when filed, will be the first audited look at Anthropic's compute costs.