Anthropic tells investors it will be profitable for second straight quarter

Anthropic has told its backers it will be profitable this quarter, as it moves to allay investor concerns about the aggressive cash burn of frontier AI companies ahead of its blockbuster initial public offering.

The company has told a small group of shareholders that its adjusted operating income will be positive for the second consecutive quarter, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter. The measure strips out costs including stock-based compensation.

Anthropic’s gross margins are above 80 per cent before accounting for revenue shared with distribution partners, including Amazon, and the cost of training its models, according to two of the people.

Sustained profitability would be a major milestone for the five-year-old company ahead of its planned listing.

Anthropic has chosen Nasdaq as the venue for an IPO that could value it at $2tn or more, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The company declined to comment.

The Claude maker had been expected to unveil its prospectus last week. Instead, the company shared documents with a small group of investors and will field questions from them before making them public, according to people familiar with the process.

The listing comes at a fraught moment for the AI industry, as the blistering pace of development collides with public anxiety over the technology’s impact on everything from the environment and jobs to the future of humanity.

On Saturday, the $965bn start-up’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, called on the AI industry to slow the pace of development.

Potential investors must now grapple with the implications of the intense scrutiny of AI safety, as well as a business model that has yet to be tested on public markets.

Anthropic recorded an adjusted operating profit in the second quarter, after revenues surged 14-fold from a year earlier to $11.5bn. The group hit annualised revenue of $65bn at the end of July, up from $9bn at the end of last year.

“If you continue to operate at these margins and growth rates, it will be so hard to compete [with Anthropic] because they have so much [computing resource],” said Joey Brookhart, an analyst covering AI labs at SemiAnalysis.

Investors are forecasting that Anthropic will end the year with $120bn in annualised revenue and close 2027 with almost triple that, he added.

But attempts to track the trajectory of the business have been complicated by calls to slow or pause AI development. Doing so could save the company billions of dollars in costs to train new, more advanced models, but could also allow rivals to close the gap.

In an essay published on Saturday, Amodei said the industry “must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” amid alarm about the power of new models. His call was echoed by OpenAI boss Sam Altman and SpaceX chief Elon Musk.

Altman confirmed to Fortune on Saturday that OpenAI would remain private this year, despite confidentially filing its own IPO paperwork in June. He said that 2026 would be an “ill-advised moment” to go public given the concerns over AI safety.

Employees at the rival labs have been in close communication over recent weeks about instituting measures to safely manage the development of AI, according to people familiar with the talks, which are highly unusual given the fierce competition between the companies.

Those private discussions were spurred by recent security breaches, a growing unease among researchers about the capability of new AI models and a recognition that President Donald Trump was unlikely to put the brakes on the technology.

“We are on our own here,” said one employee at a frontier lab.

The back-channel dialogue laid the ground for Altman and Amodei to publicly declare their support for a slowdown in lockstep this week, said the people with knowledge of the matter.

Business Insider reported earlier that Anthropic would list on Nasdaq.