Anthropic is projecting $10.9 billion in Q2 revenue, up more than 2x from $4.8 billion in Q1. Not only that, but it’s expecting to report $559 million in profit, making Q2 the first profitable quarter in the company’s history just in time for its IPO, which is expected to take place in October.
Anthropic’s pace of growth is remarkable; as WSJ pointed out, the company’s quarterly revenue is now growing faster than Zoom’s did during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. The biggest driver of that growth is enterprise adoption of Claude’s coding tools. As we noted in a recent perspective, Anthropic’s run-rate revenue had already climbed to roughly $40 billion annualized even before these Q2 projections, with Claude Code alone generating over $2.5 billion.
The unit economics underlying the growth are almost as impressive as the growth itself. In Q1, Anthropic spent 71 cents on compute for every dollar of revenue. In Q2, it expects to spend 56 cents. Not only is Anthropic growing quickly at scale, but its margin is improving. This likely explains the feverish demand for Anthropic shares in private markets, sometimes through less-than-reputable SPVs. Anthropic took aim at such vehicles in a post warning investors against unauthorized stock sales, where it stated in no uncertain terms: “Any sale or transfer of Anthropic stock, or any interest in Anthropic stock, that has not been approved by our Board of Directors is void and will not be recognized.”
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