Anthropic's quarterly revenue jumps 50% to $16.8bn ahead of planned IPO

Anthropic told investors this week that its revenue for the third quarter rose by nearly 50 percent to $16.8 billion, according to the Financial Times, which cited people with knowledge of the matter. The figures came out of an investor day the company held on Wednesday, part of preparation for a planned initial public offering, the first sale of shares to the public.

The briefing included cost figures Anthropic has not previously disclosed in this form. For every dollar it spent on computing power, the company generated $1.70 in revenue during the quarter. Its adjusted operating margin, the share of revenue left after costs but before setting aside stock-based compensation, came to 11 percent.

Anthropic also addressed a practice it has moved to restrict: distillation, where a rival AI lab trains its own model on large volumes of output from a more advanced model, copying its behavior at a fraction of the cost. The company told investors distillation accounted for 5 to 7 percent of its revenue and said it had cut the practice back “materially” in the third quarter, according to four people with direct knowledge of the discussion, the FT reported.

What the distillation numbers imply

That disclosure points to a sizable business built on scraping Anthropic’s outputs. If distillation made up around 5 percent of revenue in the second quarter, before the crackdown, the labs doing it would have spent more than half a billion dollars on that usage in a single quarter, based on rough math from the reported figures. Anthropic has not named which companies it believes were distilling its models, or detailed how it curtailed the practice.

The FT report also noted a shift in how Anthropic talks to investors. The company has previously cited “annualized run-rate revenue,” a projection that takes current monthly revenue and multiplies it by twelve rather than reporting revenue actually earned. That metric was reportedly absent from this week’s investor communications, replaced by the quarterly figures above.

Much about the investor day remains unconfirmed outside the FT’s sourcing. Anthropic has not issued its own public statement matching these numbers, and the company’s full cost structure, including what counts toward “computing power” in its $1.70-per-dollar figure, has not been spelled out.

What happens to Anthropic’s margins as it keeps investing in compute, and whether any IPO filing discloses unadjusted figures alongside these, will matter once a registration statement becomes public. Investors will also be watching whether the distillation crackdown holds, or whether rival labs find other ways to train on Anthropic’s outputs.