Anthropic reportedly posts $16.8B Q3 revenue and an adjusted profit as IPO talk builds

The figures, reported by Yahoo Finance and echoed by secondary outlets citing Bloomberg and insiders, would make Anthropic one of very few frontier labs to report an operating profit. The growth rate stands out: 46% sequential growth on a base already in the tens of billions annualized.

The mechanics behind the margin are enterprise API and agent workloads. Anthropic's own engineering blog this week said its internal merge volume rose from 2,500 to more than 30,000 changes per day between May and September, a proxy for how agentic coding is driving token consumption. An 85% gross margin implies strong pricing power on Opus-class models despite open-weight price compression from DeepSeek and others.

For comparison, OpenAI's annualized revenue was reported near $50 billion in late September, below earlier $70 billion projections. Anthropic's quarterly run rate is therefore approaching OpenAI's scale while reportedly turning profitable.

Caveats: the numbers are unconfirmed and 'adjusted' profitability excludes items such as stock compensation and possibly compute commitments. IPO speculation is just that for now. Watch for official confirmation and how the EU's new AI Act information requests affect the company's European expansion.