Anthropic is growing rapidly, but its growth rate is slowing down, which may drag down IPO valuations

Abstract:

According to Anthropic's organizational structure information obtained by "The Information", the company disclosed at a communication meeting for potential IPO investors that although the company's revenue is still growing rapidly, the growth rate has slowed down. Some investors participating in the meeting believed that the company needs to curb its valuation expectations.

At a private investor conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Anthropic announced third-quarter revenue of $16.8 billion, an increase of about 45% from the second quarter, people familiar with the matter said. The revenue is more than 3.6 times the total revenue for 2025. However, compared with the second quarter, the growth rate of this quarter has declined significantly; in the second quarter, the market demand for Claude Code products was booming, and revenue soared by more than 140% compared with the first quarter.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic

Anthropic also disclosed that as of the latest quarter, its adjusted operating profit margin for the year was 11%, people familiar with the matter said. This indicator excludes large expenses such as equity compensation, but it also shows that the company has made certain progress on the road to profitability.

At the same time, the company acknowledged that it faces multiple challenges, people familiar with the matter said. According to its calculations, 5%‑7% of the company’s revenue comes from

model distillation

Anthropic has repeatedly accused Chinese AI laboratories of distilling and stealing its models, and said it has been taking measures to curb such behavior. The company said at an investor conference Wednesday that revenue from model distillation will decline and continue to be a drag on the company's revenue numbers during the current cycle, people familiar with the matter said.

This year Anthropic has achieved extremely high growth rates, and the market’s expectations for it have also been raised to extraordinary heights. However, the signals released by this communication conference are mixed. Wall Street and Silicon Valley are currently divided over the valuation of AI companies.

Various market concerns have begun to cool the market's previous enthusiasm for Anthropic's large-scale IPO. Anthropic's private equity valuation was less than $20 billion two years ago and has soared to $965 billion in May this year. Although investors still believe that the IPO is likely to be completed, some potential investors are disappointed with this revenue data. They believe that investment banks should lower their valuation expectations, and that the IPO valuation should perhaps be less than US$1.5 trillion, rather than the US$2 trillion target privately proposed by some investment banks.

Anthropic expects to complete the listing before the Thanksgiving holiday in November. This IPO will be the biggest litmus test for investors’ attitude towards the AI ​​boom, which has been driving the U.S. stock market and economy for several years. Investors have begun to resist the prospects and high valuation expectations of some AI-related companies.

Borrowing costs have risen recently, and the stock prices of many listed AI data center operators have fallen. Firmus Grid, an AI data center company invested by Nvidia, canceled its $5 billion Australian IPO last week, citing severe market fluctuations, a rare occurrence in the past 30 years; other AI cloud companies' financing and listing plans also encountered resistance.

Although the Claude Code and Cowork tools for the enterprise have driven Anthropic’s revenue this year to overtake its competitor OpenAI, industry competition is intensifying. OpenAI strengthens its enterprise-level AI products and competes with Anthropic at lower prices.

Competitors such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta have successively launched new models, and the performance in some scenarios is already comparable to Anthropic. More and more companies are concerned about the skyrocketing costs associated with AI and are turning to lower-cost alternatives such as open source models.

It is worth noting that Anthropic did not update annualized revenue data during its investor conference on Wednesday. This indicator is monthly revenue multiplied by 12. It once reached US$65 billion in July and has always been regarded as an important growth indicator. However, the statistical caliber itself has also been questioned. OpenAI has previously experienced annualized revenue statistics, which exposed the flaws of this indicator.