Anthropic's run rate hits $65bn, overtaking OpenAI's pace

Anthropic's annualised revenue run rate hit $65 billion at the end of July, seven times where it stood a year earlier, according to an investor update confirmed by CNBC on Monday. The figure puts the Claude maker well ahead of OpenAI, whose run rate has recently reached about $40 billion, CNBC reported.

The climb has been steep and recent. Anthropic's run rate stood at roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025, passed $30 billion in April, and topped $47 billion in May, before jumping to $65 billion in July. Preliminary second-quarter revenue came in at $11.5 billion, a 14-fold increase on the $787 million booked in the same quarter a year earlier, and the company reported positive adjusted operating income for the quarter — not a GAAP profit, but a signal the business is covering its costs on an adjusted basis.

Anthropic attributes the growth to businesses adopting Claude for coding and agent-based work, according to CNBC. Run rate is not booked revenue: Anthropic's actual booked revenue for the first half of 2026 was about $16.2 billion, and the company reports cloud-reseller revenue on a gross basis, which inflates the top line relative to net terms.

The numbers come as Anthropic pushes toward a public listing. It confidentially filed an IPO prospectus in June and has begun early investor meetings, though no timeline has been set. Its last private funding round, in late May, valued the company at $965 billion on a $65 billion raise. The Financial Times has reported that investors now expect Anthropic to close 2026 at a $100-120 billion run rate, and that the company may seek a valuation above $2 trillion when it does go public — which would make it the largest stock market debut on record, according to TechCrunch. Reuters has separately reported 2028 revenue projections of roughly $190-200 billion.

The gap to OpenAI's $40 billion run rate is the headline number for competitors and investors alike: Anthropic is growing faster off a similar base, largely on the back of enterprise coding and agent deployments rather than consumer subscriptions. That skews its revenue mix toward business customers with higher switching costs, a point prospective IPO investors will weigh heavily against OpenAI's more consumer-heavy model.

The $2 trillion-plus valuation talk is still investor speculation, not a company target, and the run-rate figure itself is a projection, not booked revenue — actual H1 bookings of $16.2 billion are a fraction of the headline number. Anyone pricing the IPO will need to reconcile the eye-catching run rate with that slower-moving cash reality, and with how much of the growth rides on a handful of large enterprise contracts versus broad-based demand.