Anthropic reports $16.8B Q3 revenue, up 45% from Q2, and an adjusted profit ahead of its expected IPO

Anthropic told prospective investors that its third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion, up from about $11.6 billion in the second quarter, according to people familiar with the matter. The Wall Street Journal's headline put the jump at 45%. That is a quarter-over-quarter comparison, and outlets differ slightly: some cite a second-quarter base of $11.5 billion and growth of 46%, while the Financial Times described a rise of nearly 50%. The company declined to comment on the figures.

Anthropic also said it was profitable on an adjusted basis in the quarter and cash-flow positive, generating $1.70 in revenue for every dollar spent on computing power, according to the Financial Times as relayed by CNBC. TipRanks reported an adjusted operating margin of 11%, its second straight quarter of adjusted profitability. The quarter implies an annualized run rate of about $67 billion.

The caveat is the definition. Adjusted measures usually exclude stock compensation and other noncash charges, so they say more about the operating trend than about bottom-line earnings, and documents previously reviewed by Bloomberg showed a net loss of nearly $42 billion. Anthropic is also not publicly traded, so there is no listed share price to read the news against. Any valuation floated before an IPO, including the roughly $2 trillion some reports cite, is an opinion until shares trade.

On timing, formal IPO marketing could start as soon as the week of November 9, with Anthropic aiming to trade before Thanksgiving, though the schedule is fluid. Its listed investors fell that day, with GOOGL and AMZN each down 1.74%, and Barron's ran a headline linking Anthropic to weakness in AI-related stocks such as Sandisk and AMD. Investors may watch whether the public filing confirms the adjusted-profit claim and how the net loss and compute commitments compare.