Anthropic Is About to Post a Profit. It Got There by Skipping the Problem Everyone Else Has.

Anthropic told investors it expects revenue of $10.9 billion for the April to June quarter and an operating profit of $559 million. If it lands, it will be the first frontier AI lab to make money in a quarter. The Wall Street Journal reported the figures first, and CNBC and Bloomberg have since confirmed them. That stands out in an industry where everyone loses money. OpenAI has around 900 million weekly users and is still losing billions. Anthropic has a small fraction of that audience and is about to turn a profit. The difference is who its customers are. 

No Free Tier to Pay For

OpenAI’s problem is that roughly 95% of its users pay nothing, and every question they ask costs money to answer. That bill runs into the billions. Anthropic never built that. It went after businesses and software developers instead. These pay the company from the first day they use the product. Claude Code, its coding tool, has become the centre of the business. Companies buying it are not experimenting. They are building it into how they work every day. That is a smaller audience and a less famous one. It also does not need advertising, a cheap tier, or any of the machinery OpenAI is now building to make free users pay for themselves. 

Sales Have Grown More Than Tenfold in a Year

Anthropic made $4.8 billion in the first quarter of 2026. The second quarter is expected to more than double that. Anthropic also reports an annual sales pace, which is what it would earn over a full year if sales held at current levels. That figure was $4 billion in July last year and $9 billion by the end of 2025. By May it had reached $47 billion, a figure Anthropic disclosed alongside its latest funding round. The company has told investors it expects to pass $50 billion by the end of June. 

Growth like that is rare at any size, but at this scale, it is close to unheard of. 

It Has Already Passed OpenAI

In late May, Anthropic raised $65 billion at a valuation of $965 billion. That put it above OpenAI’s $852 billion for the first time. A few days later, on June 1, Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO. The company has held internal discussions about listing as early as October. OpenAI filed a week after that and is reported to be leaning towards 2027. Amazon and Google are both large shareholders. Amazon does not disclose its stake, but Fortune estimates it in the mid-to-high teens by percentage. Google holds around 14%, capped at 15%. Neither has voting rights or a board seat, a structure built to keep regulators comfortable. 

What Could Still Go Wrong

Anthropic has told investors that profits may not last, with planned data center spending expected to push later quarters back into losses. The bigger risk is political. At the end of February, the Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk, a label normally used for foreign adversaries. The dispute followed Anthropic’s refusal to give the military unrestricted access to its models for all lawful purposes. Anthropic is fighting the decision in court and has said it could put billions of dollars of revenue in danger. According to Bloomberg, more than 100 enterprise customers have since raised concerns about continuing with the company. That is a difficult thing to carry into a listing. 

What Happens If It Lists First

The order matters more than it seems. No AI company of this size has ever gone public, so the first one sets the tone for the rest. Anthropic filed first and may list first. Every rival company is asking investors to believe profits will come. Anthropic can point to one.