Anthropic has told a small group of shareholders that it expects to report positive adjusted operating income for a second consecutive quarter, according to a Financial Times report carried by Reuters. The disclosure arrives weeks before the company is expected to publish its IPO prospectus, and it gives investors a specific word to carry into the roadshow: profitable.
The word carries caveats. The measure excludes costs including stock-based compensation, and the gross margin cited in the report, above 80%, is calculated before revenue shared with distribution partners such as Amazon and before the cost of training models. Anthropic itself has confirmed nothing, and Reuters could not verify the report. What is certain is that the company has chosen this moment, weeks before a listing that could value it at $2 trillion or more, to circulate a profit narrative.
What the Numbers Say
The numbers behind the report are large by any standard. Revenue for the June quarter reached about $11.5 billion, roughly fourteen times the year-earlier figure, per the FT report. Annualized revenue reached about $65 billion at the end of July, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. The first profitable quarter on the adjusted measure was the three months ending in June, with the current quarter, closing September 30, expected to be the second.
Some summaries of the FT story put the adjusted operating profit near $559 million on the $11.5 billion quarter, a figure that traces to investor documents Bloomberg reported on rather than to the FT text itself. It is best treated as reported, not confirmed.
The growth figures rest on the same kind of leaked investor materials. Anthropic has not published financial statements. Its revenue run-rate has been a series of reported numbers, each larger than the last: roughly $4 billion in July 2025, $9 billion at the end of 2025, past $30 billion in April 2026, and $65 billion by the end of July, with an internal year-end target reported at $100 billion. Research shop SemiAnalysis has gone further in its own analysis, projecting GAAP operating income above $1 billion for the current quarter, net dollar retention near 500%, and its Claude Code tool accounting for more than 7% of code committed to GitHub. SemiAnalysis's Dylan Patel told SBS News that with these margins and growth it will be "very difficult for others to catch up with Anthropic, which possesses vast computing resources."
Each number circulates ahead of the only document that will make them official: the S-1.
What "Adjusted" Adjusts Away
The profit story hinges on what the measure leaves out. Stock-based compensation is the largest exclusion, and for an AI lab hiring scarce researchers it is not a rounding error. The gross margin figure also comes before revenue shared with distribution partners, which MarketWatch called the "very big caveat," and before model training costs, the single largest expense in the business.
The skeptics have already put names to the metric. Short seller Jim Chanos dismissed it as cost-adjusted EBITDA in the telling. Oracle executive Matt Asay called the measure a made-up accounting fiction while praising the business itself as amazing. The company's implicit answer is that adjusted metrics are standard equipment in technology IPOs, that stock compensation is a non-cash cost, and that the market knows how to read these numbers. That answer is true and incomplete at the same time. Adjusted metrics are standard; they are also exactly the numbers companies choose when the gap between them and GAAP is doing useful work.
None of this makes the profit claim false. It makes it selective, and selectivity is what investor documents are for. The prospectus will carry the full treatment, and the prospectus is due within weeks.
The FT report also describes the disclosure process itself: Anthropic had been expected to publish its prospectus last week, but instead shared documents first with a small group of investors and will answer their questions before making anything public. That sequencing is information of its own. A company testing its numbers on a curated audience before the formal roadshow is behaving like a company that knows the numbers will be scrutinized.
The IPO Clock
The timetable, assembled from Reuters reporting, now looks like this. Anthropic filed confidentially with the SEC on June 1. The prospectus was expected as early as last week and is now expected late this month. The roadshow begins no earlier than mid-October. Pricing and listing are targeted for the days just before the November 3 midterm elections. The exchange will be Nasdaq, and the bankers are a full Wall Street delegation: Morgan Stanley in the lead-left role, Goldman Sachs as stabilization agent, with JPMorgan, Citi, and Barclays in support.
The ambition matches the calendar. Reuters reported that Anthropic is seeking to raise as much as $100 billion at a valuation around $2 trillion, which would make it the largest raise in history. Nvidia is in talks to anchor the offering with up to $10 billion. A $15 billion revolving credit facility, up from $2.5 billion a year ago, is being finalized with a 17-bank syndicate, and the banks want it signed before the roadshow begins. Nothing in that stack is confirmed by the company, and nothing in it suggests modesty.
The midterm timing is deliberate. Listing in the days before November 3 puts the debut ahead of any election-driven market turbulence. Prediction markets currently put roughly a three-in-five probability on an October listing, down from higher odds earlier in the month, a measure of how much of the timetable still rests on unreported decisions. A company raising $100 billion in equity and a $15 billion credit line in the same season is not hedging. It is scaling.
The Nvidia anchor, if it closes, would do more than supply demand. A $10 billion commitment from the company that builds the industry's chips would tie Anthropic's capital story to the same supplier economics its critics call circular, and it would signal to institutional investors that the deepest pockets in the ecosystem are willing to buy. It would also deepen a relationship regulators could read either way: a customer and supplier aligning long-term interests, or the AI stack concentrating further.
Profit and the Pacing Call
The profit story did not arrive alone. Two days before the FT report, chief executive Dario Amodei published a call to slow frontier AI development, arguing the field should pace itself. OpenAI's Sam Altman and SpaceX's Elon Musk made similar sounds in the same week. Altman added that OpenAI will stay private this year, which draws a sharp contrast: the two leading labs face the same political winds with opposite strategies, one postponing the public market and one sprinting toward it. From the outside these look like different messages. They may be the same strategy aimed at the same risk.
A company about to ask public markets for $100 billion needs both stories to hold. The profit narrative tells investors the business model works at scale. The pacing narrative tells regulators, politicians, and the public that the company can be trusted with the scale it has reached. Each de-risks the offering from a different side. The tension between them, if there is one, belongs to the weeks after the listing, when a company that told the world it would slow down must explain to its new shareholders why growth continues.
The Number That Matters
The market will get its official look this month. The S-1 will show revenue with audit discipline, gross margin with the Amazon arrangement visible, and operating income with stock compensation where it belongs, on the line. It will also show something the leaked documents cannot: a company standing behind its own numbers, under oath.
Until then, the profit story is a preview with an asterisk. Two straight quarters of adjusted operating profit is a genuine change for a company that spent its first years as a furnace for capital. Whether it is a business result or a presentation choice is exactly the question the roadshow exists to answer, and the answer will be priced in the first week of November.
If the audited numbers agree, the kind of company on offer changes. It is no longer a bet on a future business model; it is a bet on a business model with evidence. What the evidence excludes, and whether the market cares, is what $2 trillion worth of judgment is about.
The first test of the profit story is not the roadshow. It is the expense lines of the prospectus: how much stock compensation the company booked, how much revenue flows through partners, and how the margin looks with training costs where they belong. The investor documents that leaked ahead of the filing chose their numbers. The filing will not have that luxury.
Primary sources
- Reuters (via The Star), "Anthropic tells investors it will be profitable for second straight quarter, FT reports," for the core disclosure, the exclusions, and the margin figure.
- Reuters (via Investing.com), "Anthropic IPO launch shifts toward mid-October, sources say," for the IPO timetable and underwriters.
- Reuters (via Investing.com), "Nvidia in talks to invest in Anthropic's mega IPO, sources say," for the raise size, valuation, and anchor talks.
- Financial Times report syndications (Investing.com, AASTOCKS), for the revenue figures and the shareholder-disclosure process.
- MarketWatch, "The very big caveat to the report that Anthropic is profitable for a second straight quarter," for the accounting caveats.