Anthropic reports $16.8B Q3 revenue and adjusted profitability ahead of IPO

Bloomberg, citing the FT, reports that Anthropic's Q3 revenue reached $16.8B on an adjusted-profitable basis. That is a steep climb from roughly $11.5B in Q2 and gives Anthropic a strong pre-IPO story.

Simon Willison highlighted a striking detail: Anthropic told investors that distillation accounted for 5-7% of revenue. If that is accurate, rival labs spent more than half a billion dollars distilling Anthropic models. Anthropic separately says new safeguards cut data harvesting in distillation attacks by 90-99%, which may suppress that revenue line.

The figures fueled r/singularity discussion. Ethan Mollick cautioned that hypergrowth labs are 'not immune from the inevitable politics, disfunction and confusion' of fast-growing firms.

Watch the S-1 for margin detail and customer concentration.