{"slug": "weve-never-seen-an-anthropic-before", "title": "We’ve never seen an Anthropic before", "summary": "Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate hit $65 billion at the end of July 2025, nearly double OpenAI's $40 billion, as the AI startup prepares for an IPO expected in October. Anthropic's Q2 revenue surged to $11.5 billion from $787 million a year earlier, and the company could target a $2 trillion valuation, with some analysts predicting $3 trillion by end of 2026.", "body_md": "# We’ve never seen an Anthropic before\n\n[AI Supremacy](https://www.ai-supremacy.com)\n\nAnthropic’s IPO is going to leave OpenAI in the past.\n\nAs Anthropic’s IPO approaches likely in October, likely just 8 to 12 weeks from now - it’s beginning to attract a different kind of [attention](/glossary/attention). SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are likely to be the **biggest trio of IPOs the U.S. public markets have ever seen**. While OpenAI’s revenue growth continues to slow, Anthropic’s ARR continues to accelerate even at a very high scale.\n\nAnthropic told investors over the weekend that its annualized revenue run rate hit $65 billion at the end of July, 2025.\n\nWhile OpenAI said its ARR has hit $40 billion.\n\nSince Anthropic includes marketplace partner commissions (gross basis) in its reported ARR, whereas OpenAI reports metrics net of Microsoft’s cut, Anthropic’s relative ARR might be slightly overstated compared to OpenAI. But even while [ChatGPT](/compare/chatgpt-vs-claude) rushes to Ad markets, [OpenAI’s slowdown](https://sources.news/p/openais-big-slowdown) is sort of a big deal pre-IPO. This at a time when routing and code wrappers favor Chinese open-weight models over OpenAI model usage due to cheaper token costs. OpenAI reduced API prices for the GPT-5.6 family on July 30, 2026, even going so far as to cut the cost of GPT-5.6 Lune by 80%. What an act of desperation. The revenue tells the real story.\n\n### Open-Source is disrupting OpenAI’s Revenue Growth\n\nSo ironically OpenAI that makes around half of its revenue from B2B vs. B2C, risks being disrupted by Open-source models out of China, even as Anthropic doesn’t feel the same bite. Anthropic has a premium advantage as the global leading frontier lab for coding LLMs.\n\nWhile Anthropic even had its [best Mythos model blocked](https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access), its revenue doesn’t seem to have been impacted yet: and, *like I had predicted* months ago, Anthropic has blown by OpenAI and might have **2x the revenue OpenAI does by the time OpenAI finally goes IPO.** It’s hard to believe, and it’s one for the history books.\n\nIf SpaceX’s IPO valuation is anything to go by, it (Anthropic) should be targeting [a $2 Trillion valuation](https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/anthropic-reportedly-aiming-valuation-2-143819235.html). SpaceX went public at an outrageous $1.75 trillion valuation while not being close to profitability and is accelerating Capex way too fast. I believe **Anthropic could have close to a valuation of $3 Trillion by the end of 2026**, because we’ve never seen growth like it has shown.\n\n#### Historic Anthropic Revenue Growth in 2026\n\nAnthropic's Enterprise AI strategy experienced an inflection point in 2026.\n\nOn a quarterly basis, Anthropic already nearly has double OpenAI’s revenue in Q2, and OpenAI has been accelerating fast the last few years. We’ve essentially never seen a company or an [AI startup](/category/startups) like Anthropic, in history. We know that OpenAI has higher [compute](/glossary/compute) costs, has worse financials and executes much more poorly on AI product. As the market becomes more competitive, it will continue to be squeezed. We simply won’t consider it a frontier lab for very much longer.\n\n## Anthropic's revenue for the second quarter surged to $11.5 billion, up from $787 million a year ago. It's been growing at an incredibly fast pace.\n\nIt doesn’t matter that ChatGPT has 800 million “weekly” active users, ever since its marketshare[ dropped below 50%](https://x.com/i/trending/2066923074604454352?lang=en) and it’s market share continues to rapidly decline. Anthropic’s success as the dominant [Generative AI](/glossary/generative-ai) API, is accelerating the entire Cloud computing industry by itself.\n\n### So how much has Anthropic’s Revenue increased in the last two years?\n\nIt’s hard to understand how growth could continue even at this scale (of the tens of billions) ? It’s meaningfully changed the trajectory of Google Cloud and AWS growth who both have significant equity (and partnerships) in the AI startup.\n\n## Anthropic's ARR has increased between 2,900% (from year-end 2024) and 64,900% (from start-of-year 2024).\n\n**Anthropic is thus the single primary tailwind for BigTech Earnings in 2026**. Nobody grows 14x as this scale, nobody. For all the marketing gimmicks of OpenAI and insane confidence in SpaceX (including sadly some Pension funds), its three companies carrying the entire AI boom: **TSMC, Nvidia and Anthropic**. These companies are the backbone of what we call Generative AI of the last three years.\n\nYellow line is Anthropic 🟡\n\nGreen line is Nvidia 🟢\n\nBlue line is TSMC 🔵\n\nIf Nvidia wants to subsidize compute as the “[Bank of AI](https://www.ft.com/content/4c93c894-04b8-49dc-be41-98ae79f540f8?syn-25a6b1a6=1)” (so prolific is it in circular and vendor financing), it should enable Anthropic to have compute parity with OpenAI. Nvidia is subsidizing Neo Clouds and the costs of compute at radical levels artificially inflating the value of the cost per token.\n\nAnthropic is increasing ARR around $9 Billion per quarter in mid 2026. Anthropic's Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) has been growing roughly **3x to 4x faster** than OpenAI's over recent quarters, driven largely by enterprise adoption and tooling like [Claude](/glossary/claude) Code. **By the time OpenAI goes IPO, Anthropic won’t be a comparable company**. It won’t have a peer competitor, do you understand what that means? Not Google, not OpenAI, not [DeepSeek](/compare/llama-4-vs-deepseek-r1) or Alibaba, not even close. By 2030, Anthropic will have achieved [AI Supremacy](https://www.ai-supremacy.com/).\n\n### OpenAI really is Slowing\n\nGet AI news in your inbox\n\nDaily digest of what matters in AI.\n\n## Key Terms Explained\n\n[Anthropic](/glossary/anthropic)\n\nAn AI safety company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, including Dario and Daniela Amodei.\n\n[Attention](/glossary/attention)\n\nA mechanism that lets neural networks focus on the most relevant parts of their input when producing output.\n\n[Claude](/glossary/claude)\n\nAnthropic's family of AI assistants, including Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus.\n\n[Compute](/glossary/compute)\n\nThe processing power needed to train and run AI models.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/weve-never-seen-an-anthropic-before", "canonical_source": "https://www.machinebrief.com/news/weve-never-seen-an-anthropic-before-4ngm", "published_at": "2026-08-20 09:31:29+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-20 10:13:15.466033+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-startups", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Anthropic", "OpenAI", "SpaceX", "ChatGPT", "GPT-5.6"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/weve-never-seen-an-anthropic-before", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/weve-never-seen-an-anthropic-before.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/weve-never-seen-an-anthropic-before.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/weve-never-seen-an-anthropic-before.jsonld"}}