Anthropic's revenue run rate reportedly surpasses $65 billion pre-IPO
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Anthropic's second quarter revenue exploded from a year ago, helping push the AI lab's annualized revenue run rate above $65 billion ahead of its expected IPO, according to figures reported by Bloomberg.
Why it matters: By their latest reported revenue run rates, Anthropic has pulled ahead of rival OpenAI.
By the numbers: Anthropic generated more than $11.5 billion in preliminary revenue in the second quarter, according to documents seen by Bloomberg.
- That's more than 14 times what it generated in the same quarter last year and more than double Q1 revenue of $4.73 billion, a sequential increase of more than 140%.
- The reported $65 billion run rate — an estimate of future annual revenue based on a short period of data — was hit at the end of July, per Bloomberg, and implies a sevenfold increase from where it was at the end of last year.
Between the lines: That growth is particularly notable given the scale Anthropic had already reached entering the quarter, according to an Anthropic investor who spoke with Axios.
OpenAI's latest revenue run rate hit $40 billion, according to a message shared internally by co-founder Greg Brockman last week.
- Caveat: The two companies may not measure revenue the same way.
Follow the money: Anthropic could go public before its rival.
- The company is meeting with potential new investors ahead of its planned IPO, expected in September or October, according to a source familiar with the matter.
- Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are working with Anthropic on the offering.
- IPOs would help the companies tap additional pools of capital to secure more capacity for model usage — and going first could potentially give the Claude maker a leg up.
What we're watching: Whether efficiency becomes the next battleground between the leading AI labs as they look to expand margins.
- "Anthropic was much more token efficient than OpenAI but OAI has closed some of the gap," Gavin Baker, Managing Partner at Atreides Management told Axios' Dan Primack via text.
- OpenAI and Anthropic have both cut deals with major inference providers and have their own chip ambitions, which could allow them to lower the cost of servicing AI queries going forward.
Zoom in: "Even though Anthropic has a premium model cost... the work that gets done is correct more often than the cheaper, less efficient models," Harrison Rolfes of Pitchbook told Axios.
- According to Rolfes' model, Anthropic's Opus 4.8 can have a lower cost per successfully completed task than competing models because it provides a better answer "the majority of the time," so you're not paying to re-run a query or using a paid human to double check model work, he said.
Reality check: The "winner" of any metric used to measure where each company is in the AI race changes constantly.
- But it has become clear that going for enterprise revenue adoption has been a winning strategy.
- OpenAI is on track to generate over half its revenue from enterprise customers by year end.
