Anthropic told investors over the weekend that its annualized revenue run rate reached $65 billion at the end of July, a sevenfold increase from a year ago and a figure that puts the Claude maker well ahead of rival OpenAI, whose run rate recently hit $40 billion. The number was shared in a confidential update to investors and confirmed by CNBC on Monday. It arrives as Anthropic prepares for what is expected to be one of the largest AI IPOs on record, with the company already carrying a $965 billion valuation.
Preliminary second-quarter revenue came in at $11.5 billion, a 14-fold jump from the same period a year ago. The trajectory has been almost vertical: Anthropic said in May its run rate had topped $47 billion, compared to roughly $10 billion in total revenue for all of 2025. The company declined to comment on the July figure.
The gap with OpenAI is the striking part. A year ago Anthropic was widely viewed as the technical peer but commercial underdog to OpenAI, with a fraction of the consumer footprint and a heavy dependence on API and enterprise deals. Those enterprise deals are now the story. Claude has become a default model choice inside coding tools, agent platforms, and large-company deployments, and the revenue is following.
Key facts
- 01Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate hit $65B at the end of July, a sevenfold increase from a year ago.
- 02Preliminary Q2 revenue came in at $11.5B, a 14-fold jump year-over-year.
- 03The run rate was $47B in May, up from roughly $10B in total 2025 revenue.
- 04Rival OpenAI's annualized run rate recently reached $40B, per CNBC reporting last week.
- 05Anthropic filed its IPO prospectus confidentially with the SEC in June and is valued at $965B.
Anthropic filed its IPO prospectus confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and has been holding preliminary meetings with potential investors. It has not disclosed a target debut date. At a $965 billion valuation, the company needs to demonstrate that its enterprise growth curve is durable rather than a one-year spike driven by the current coding-agent boom.
The July disclosure is designed to make that case. A jump from a $47 billion run rate in May to $65 billion in July implies roughly $18 billion in run-rate additions in two months, an acceleration rather than a deceleration. Bloomberg was first to report the $65 billion figure.
The commercial numbers land against a rougher political backdrop. In June, Anthropic temporarily disabled access to two of its most advanced models, Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, to comply with an export control directive that cited national security authorities. The models were restored after about two weeks of tense negotiations, but the episode highlighted how exposed Anthropic has become to federal decisions about which frontier models can be deployed and to whom.
Anthropic was also blacklisted by the Pentagon earlier this year after discussions about military use of its models broke down. The company has publicly said it wants to repair the relationship with Washington rather than retreat from federal work.
That posture matters for the IPO. Public-market investors underwriting a near-trillion-dollar valuation will want assurance that regulatory friction with the Trump administration is manageable rather than existential. The June export-control episode, resolved in two weeks with the models back online, is the case Anthropic will point to. The Pentagon blacklist is the case skeptics will point to. Both are now permanent parts of the S-1 narrative.
The other overhang is competitive. OpenAI is growing quickly at $40 billion in run rate, Google is bundling Gemini into its enterprise stack, and open-weight releases from Chinese labs continue to compress the pricing premium a frontier lab can charge. Anthropic's answer so far has been to lean harder into coding and agent workloads, where Claude has retained a benchmark and user-preference lead, and to price aggressively into large enterprise contracts.
For the AI market, Anthropic crossing $65 billion in annualized run rate while still private is the clearest signal yet that the frontier-model business is a real business, not a research-lab cost center subsidized by strategic investors. The gap to OpenAI's $40 billion also reframes the two-horse race — the assumption that OpenAI is structurally ahead on revenue no longer holds, and the IPO will force both companies to defend their margins, not just their model quality, in front of public-market investors for the first time.
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