Anthropic told prospective investors that its third-quarter revenue was $16.8 billion, according to The Decoder’s report on US media coverage of a private investor meeting in San Francisco. That is roughly 45 percent more than the second quarter and more than 3.6 times the company’s revenue for all of 2025.
The same meeting contained the awkward part. In the second quarter, revenue grew by more than 140 percent over the first, driven by demand for Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding tool. A 45 percent gain is still enormous for a company this size, but it is a third of the previous quarter’s pace, and investors pricing a stock are buying the next four quarters, not the last two.
Provenance. The figure is quarterly revenue, not a run-rate, and it comes from Anthropic’s own presentation as relayed by several outlets. The Decoder does not say any of them saw a document, and it does not quote an Anthropic statement on the numbers or on the listing. The reporting on the listing itself comes from The Information, which says the IPO is set for November, before Thanksgiving. The Decoder calls it planned. No filing is mentioned, and no comment from Anthropic appears in the piece.
The run-rate matters because the company left it out. At the meeting, Anthropic said nothing about its September annualized figure or about a full-year outlook, The Decoder reports, and several potential investors noticed. The last number on record is reportedly $65 billion, for July. For scale, $16.8 billion multiplied by four is $67.2 billion, which is our arithmetic and not a figure anyone has put forward, but it suggests the quarter did not outrun the summer rate by much.
The Decoder offers explanations for the slowdown without ranking them. Summer usually means fewer working hours and fewer tokens consumed. OpenAI launched a rival product called Astra in September, which Anthropic countered only in late September with Opus 5.5. And Anthropic expects revenue from distillation, where other companies use its model’s outputs to train their own, to fall. It estimates that practice supplies 5 to 7 percent of its revenue and has rolled out countermeasures that it told investors will weigh on the current quarter.
The cost side is better than a revenue line usually implies. Adjusted operating margin, a measure that leaves out major costs such as stock-based compensation, came to 11 percent over the year through Q3, according to The Information. The Financial Times adds that Anthropic has now posted adjusted profit two quarters running, and that cash flow is positive. In the third quarter Anthropic generated $1.70 in revenue for each dollar it spent on computing. The Decoder adds caveats: training and staff costs are heavy, and open-weight models could eat into proprietary ones.
None of these sources break revenue down between API customers, consumer subscriptions and enterprise contracts, beyond the Claude Code surge in the second quarter and the distillation share. That gap matters, because a developer tool and a consumer plan do not hold up equally well when a rival ships a strong product.
The market reaction is where the two facts collide. Anthropic’s private valuation reached $965 billion in May, up from under $20 billion two years earlier, and some bankers floated a $2 trillion listing. The Decoder reports that the numbers reportedly disappointed some investors, several of whom now expect the company’s advisers to lower expectations to possibly under $1.5 trillion. That is still a vast price, but it is the distance between a story and a spreadsheet.
The backdrop is not generous: high inflation, rising borrowing costs, a public more negative than positive on AI, and a months-long price war among the major labs.
For anyone watching the November pricing, the useful number is not $16.8 billion. It is whether the full-year outlook Anthropic withheld from investors, once given, shows growth levelling off near 45 percent or continuing to fall.
Reported by The Decoder (Matthias Bastian) on 15 October 2026, citing The Information and the Financial Times.
