FEATURED

Anthropic Is Growing Faster Than OpenAI

Here is the thing about the Anthropic filing. Everyone covered the valuation number. Almost nobody slowed down on the revenue trajectory behind it.

Anthropic ended 2025 at roughly $9 billion in annualized revenue. By May 2026, that run-rate had crossed $47 billion. That is not a rounding error. That is a company that quintupled its revenue in roughly five months. Dario Amodei said it outpaced internal forecasts by a factor of eight. That quote matters. That is not a CEO reading from a script. That is someone who genuinely did not see this coming.

Q1 2026 came in at $4.8 billion. Q2 2026 is projected at $10.9 billion.

One quarter would exceed the entire company’s 2025 revenue. Let that land.

For comparison, OpenAI posted $5.7 billion in Q1 2026. OpenAI, which has a four-year head start, a dominant consumer product, and arguably the most recognized brand in the AI space. Anthropic beat them on quarterly revenue last quarter. That is not a number analysts were putting in their models a year ago. It changes the competitive story in a real way, and the market is only beginning to absorb it.

On valuation, Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion post-money valuation in late May, then submitted its confidential S-1 to the SEC on June 1. At $965 billion against a $47 billion run-rate, that works out to roughly 20x forward revenue. OpenAI’s implied multiple on the same math sits closer to 34x. That discount is either an opportunity or a warning. Probably some of both. The market is not sure yet, and that ambiguity is where the interesting bets are being made right now.

What’s interesting is the profitability angle, which almost nobody is talking about correctly. Anthropic is projecting its first quarterly operating profit in Q2 2026 – roughly $559 million on $10.9 billion in revenue. The company spent 71 cents on compute for every dollar of Q1 revenue. That ratio is expected to drop to 56 cents in Q2. That is a real efficiency gain, not a one-time accounting move. But the company has also been explicit that it may not hold: data center spend ramps hard in the second half of 2026, and Anthropic has committed to approximately $80 billion in cloud infrastructure through 2029. Longer-term projections shared with Series H investors reportedly point to $70 billion in revenue and $17 billion in cash flow by 2028. Those numbers have not been audited. They have not been publicly filed. Read them as aspirational until the public S-1 says otherwise.

Two risks are not getting enough airtime.

The first is the gross-to-net revenue question. Anthropic currently counts full end-customer spend through AWS and Google as top-line revenue, booking partner payouts as cost. If the SEC requires a shift to net revenue accounting during its review, the headline annualized number could drop somewhere between 20% and 40% in a single filing. The multiple math that institutions are currently using to justify their positions does not survive that cleanly. This is a known risk. It is embedded in how confidential S-1 reviews work. It is not being priced like one in private market conversations.

The second is the DOD situation, which is more complicated than most coverage suggests. In February 2026, the Department of Defense designated Anthropic a supply chain risk and barred federal contractors from using Claude, after Anthropic refused to allow its models to be used for autonomous weapons targeting and mass domestic surveillance. Two lawsuits followed immediately. A California federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in March blocking enforcement. The D.C. Circuit denied a parallel motion. The company remains locked out of government contracts while litigation runs. President Trump told CNBC in April a deal is possible. For enterprise clients with ethical procurement requirements, the refusal reads as a feature. For the government revenue ceiling, it is a real constraint. Investors need to decide which version they are underwriting.

One more thing. Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation. Its charter legally bakes in obligations beyond shareholder returns. That structure will almost certainly be the most uncomfortable question of the roadshow. Nobody has a clean answer for what quarterly earnings pressure looks like inside a PBC. That tension does not go away at listing.

What you can actually do with all of this right now, if you are a retail investor, is limited. Pre-IPO access requires accredited investor status and either secondary market connections, employee tender offer allocation, or late-stage fund exposure with minimums most people cannot meet. The practical angle is the indirect one. Amazon and Alphabet are both strategic investors and primary cloud providers. Anthropic revenue growth moves through AWS and Google Cloud directly. That is the more liquid expression of this trade while the S-1 review is still running.

The public S-1 will be the most consequential financial disclosure the AI industry has ever produced. Audited margins. Real retention data. Actual compute cost structures. Gross versus net revenue, settled in black and white. When it drops, every number currently being used to value AI companies across the sector gets stress-tested against something real for the first time.

Which direction that pushes things is genuinely unclear. That is not a hedge. That is just where we are.

For informational purposes only.