Anthropic Posts Its First Operating Profit on $11.5B

Anthropic told investors its preliminary second-quarter revenue topped $11.5 billion, and that the company recorded positive adjusted operating income for the quarter — the first operating profit in its history. CNBC reported the figures on Saturday, citing people familiar with the numbers. Anthropic has not published audited statements, and the company cautions that the preliminary figures could still move.

The growth curve is the headline. Anthropic booked $787 million in the same quarter of 2025 and $4.73 billion in the first quarter of this year. Q2 is therefore roughly a 14× year-on-year jump and something close to a 2.4× step up from the prior quarter alone. The company's annualized run rate crossed $47 billion in May, against about $10 billion in total revenue for all of 2025.

Where the money is coming from is no mystery. Enterprise spending on Claude coding tools and workplace agents has been the engine all year, and it is the same demand that let Anthropic overtake OpenAI in U.S. business adoption earlier this year in Ramp's corporate card-spend data. Corporate buyers have increasingly framed the purchase as cost per unit of intelligence rather than seat count, which favours whichever lab is cheapest per solved task in a given quarter.

The timing is not accidental. Anthropic filed confidentially with the SEC in June and has retained Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase for a listing that could come this autumn. A profitable quarter — even a preliminary, non-GAAP one — is a materially better number to walk into an IPO roadshow with than a loss. Its May private round priced the company at $965 billion; some sell-side analysts have floated public-market valuations north of $2 trillion, and the company is said to be modelling $190 billion to $200 billion of revenue by 2028.

The asterisk sits on the word "adjusted". Anthropic is a private company, not yet bound by public-company reporting rules, and it has not disclosed which costs the adjustment excludes or how it books compute. Ed Zitron argued in Where's Your Ed At that the milestone is partly an artifact of timing: Anthropic is understood to be paying introductory rates on a SpaceX compute contract that ramps up later, which would depress cost of revenue in exactly the May-to-June window the profit was booked in. At full rates across its providers, he estimates compute alone runs to roughly $15 billion a year — enough to erase a quarterly profit of any plausible size.

Both things can be true. A lab that was burning cash at nine figures a quarter two years ago now has a revenue base large enough that the argument has shifted from "can this ever pay for itself" to "which line items are in the adjustment". That is a different conversation, and the S-1 will settle it. Until Anthropic files publicly, the honest reading of Q2 is a real and very fast revenue ramp attached to a profitability claim that nobody outside the company can yet check.