The Pulse
Anthropic Targets a Second Profitable Quarter Before IPO
Anthropic has told a small group of shareholders that it expects positive adjusted operating income for a second consecutive quarter. The Claude maker is preparing for a potential Nasdaq IPO that could value the company at $2 trillion or mo
AI.info Team ·
Anthropic has told a small group of shareholders that it expects positive adjusted operating income for a second consecutive quarter, according to the Financial Times. The disclosure comes as the Claude maker prepares for a potential initial public offering and seeks to reassure investors that its spending on computing power and model development can support sustained growth.
The company recorded an adjusted operating profit in the second quarter, the FT reported, after revenue rose 14-fold from a year earlier to $11.5 billion. Anthropic’s adjusted measure excludes costs including stock-based compensation, meaning the figure does not represent generally accepted accounting profit.
Anthropic puts adjusted profit before a possible Nasdaq listing
Anthropic has selected Nasdaq as the venue for a potential IPO, according to a person cited by the FT. The offering could value the company at $2 trillion or more, a figure that would place the five-year-old AI lab among the most highly valued companies to reach public markets.
The company filed a confidential draft registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1. Anthropic said at the time that the filing gave it the option to go public after SEC review, while stressing that the timing would depend on market conditions and other factors. The company also said it had not set the number of shares or the offering price.
Anthropic’s private-market valuation rose to $965 billion after a $65 billion Series H funding round announced in May. The company said that round included $15 billion in previously committed investments from cloud and technology partners, including $5 billion from Amazon.
The profit figure leaves major costs outside the calculation
The adjusted operating-income figure gives investors one view of Anthropic’s financial performance, but it leaves out expenses that are central to the economics of frontier AI. The FT reported that the measure excludes costs such as stock-based compensation, while Anthropic’s gross margins exceed 80% before revenue-sharing payments to distribution partners and the cost of training its models.
Those exclusions matter because Anthropic relies on large volumes of specialized computing capacity to train and serve Claude. The company has announced agreements involving Amazon, Google, Broadcom and SpaceX as it expands access to infrastructure. Anthropic said in May that it had signed agreements with Amazon for up to five gigawatts of new capacity and with Google and Broadcom for five gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity.
A second consecutive quarter of positive adjusted operating income would give Anthropic a stronger financial narrative ahead of public disclosure. It would not, by itself, show that the company is profitable after accounting for compensation, infrastructure commitments, model-training costs and other expenses.
Revenue growth is carrying the IPO case
Anthropic’s investor pitch rests heavily on the speed of its revenue expansion. The company said in May that its annualized revenue had crossed $47 billion earlier that month, while the FT reported that second-quarter revenue reached $11.5 billion and that annualized revenue had risen to about $65 billion by late July.
That growth has been driven by enterprise adoption of Claude and related products, including Claude Code and Cowork. Anthropic said its Series H funding would support additional computing capacity, safety and interpretability research, and the products and partnerships serving its customers.
Investors are now being asked to assess whether that growth can continue while Anthropic funds increasingly expensive model development. The company’s decision to share financial documents privately with a small group of investors before making a public prospectus available gives those shareholders an early look at the numbers, but the broader market will need to wait for formal SEC filings for audited financial statements and fuller risk disclosures.
Anthropic’s filing still leaves the offering open-ended
Anthropic has not set an IPO date, share count or price. Its June announcement describes the S-1 as confidential and says the proposed offering may not proceed if market conditions or other factors do not support a listing.
The latest profitability projection strengthens the case Anthropic is making to potential public-market investors: revenue is scaling quickly, and the company can report positive adjusted operating income while it expands its infrastructure. The next test will be whether the public filing shows comparable performance after the costs excluded from that adjusted measure are included.