Anthropic told prospective investors on Wednesday that revenue in the third quarter surged 45% from the previous quarter, two people who attended an investor day said, a move that could assuage market concerns about the huge costs of developing AI systems.
Third-quarter revenue rose to $16.8 billion from $11.6 billion in the second quarter and $4.7 billion in the first quarter, the people said. Anthropic told the group that the company was profitable on an adjusted basis in the third quarter, they added.
The meeting in San Francisco was intended to familiarise prospective Anthropic investors with the company ahead of its highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO).
The IPO is expected to precede a public listing by rival OpenAI, making Anthropic an early test of investor appetite for loss-making AI developers investing heavily to achieve massive scale. Its public market debut is likely to be delayed until after the November US midterm elections, Reuters has reported.
Attendees at Wednesday's event met Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei and chief financial officer Krishna Rao and left optimistic about the company's rapid revenue growth and path to profitability, several of them told Reuters as they left its headquarters in the evening.
Amodei reiterated the company's focus on AI safety but avoided mentioning threats of human extinction, one person in the group said. In its prospectus seen by Reuters last month, Anthropic warned that advanced AI could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity".
On Wednesday, however, Anthropic executives discussed how the company was using its AI to support its own business, including designing a custom chip. The company handed out hats to attendees, some of which read "thinking".
Anthropic could see its annual revenue run rate reach $110 billion by the end of the year, according to estimates from analysts who met company executives earlier this week.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Scrutiny of AI companies' finances has intensified as they pour money into chips, data centres and computing power needed to develop and operate increasingly powerful models. Targeting a valuation of more than $2 trillion, Anthropic is seeking to convince investors that its rapid revenue growth can eventually outpace the enormous costs of building and running AI systems.
Last year, Anthropic's revenue increased twelvefold to nearly $4.6 billion, even as the company lost more than $8 billion on an operating basis, excluding write-downs of various liabilities mostly tied to previous fundraising, Reuters reported exclusively last month.
The company has committed at least $518 billion over a decade to cloud services, computing and infrastructure.
Founded by former OpenAI executives, Anthropic has emerged as one of the leading generative AI developers with its Claude family of models. Its expansion has been underpinned by Alphabet's Google and Amazon, which are simultaneously investors, suppliers of computing power and important distribution partners, as well as AI competitors.
Anthropic has also sought to distinguish itself through its focus on AI safety, warning of the dangers posed by increasingly capable systems even as it competes in the race to develop and commercialise more powerful models.
Its research has found that its own AI agents have engaged in troubling behaviour in test environments, including leaking sensitive information and sabotaging code, although the company has said it has seen no evidence of such misalignment in real-world deployments.
The Financial Times first reported the third-quarter revenue figure on Wednesday.