Anthropic promises investors a second profitable quarter

Anthropic has told investors it will be profitable for a second quarter in a row, and the profit arrived without a size attached. The measure is adjusted operating income, as FT reports, which is not the same thing as net profit.

At a glance

• Investors also heard that the annualized revenue run rate reached $65 billion at the end of July, up from more than $47 billion in May, with a listing in preparation.
• Adjusted operating income covers the operating business after interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation are stripped out, which keeps a positive result several steps away from bottom-line net income.
• The size of the profit was not disclosed, and the valuation Anthropic is chasing in the listing rests on a projection of $190–200 billion in revenue by 2028, Reuters reported earlier.

If you have not been following the raises, the ladder is steep. According to Sacra, Anthropic closed a $13 billion Series F in September 2025 at a $183 billion valuation, then a $30 billion Series G in February 2026 at $380 billion post-money. A $65 billion Series H followed in May 2026 at $965 billion post-money, per Pinggy Blog, and Sacra reports a confidential IPO filing on June 1, 2026.

The claim is about adjusted operating income, not net profit

What Anthropic told investors is narrow and specific: adjusted operating income will land on the positive side for a second straight quarter. Reuters carries the same claim. The amount is not part of it, and neither is the list of items taken out in the adjustment.

Livemint reports that Anthropic has a planned IPO, and the message to investors sits ahead of it. Nothing in the claim speaks to cash flow, to capital spending, or to what the company pays for compute, and no dollar figure travelled with either of the two quarters.

The run rate went from $47 billion in May to $65 billion in July

Those are the revenue numbers investors heard alongside the profitability claim. CNBC reported the July figure as a sevenfold increase over a year earlier, and put Anthropic's preliminary second-quarter revenue at $11.5 billion, a 14-fold jump from a year ago, citing a source familiar with the matter.

For scale, CNBC reported that Anthropic generated roughly $10 billion in revenue across all of 2025, less than the single quarter above. A run rate is not booked revenue: it annualizes a recent period, so it tracks the latest weeks rather than the trailing year. The same outlet recently put OpenAI's annualized run rate at $40 billion.

Adjusted operating income leaves out interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation

Operating income is what remains after the cost of running the business. The adjusted version goes further and pulls out non-operating items, so investors see the core operation on its own rather than the bottom line. That is the whole point of the metric, and also its limit.

Think of a restaurant reporting the evening's takings after food and wages, but before the rent, the loan on the ovens and the tax bill. The kitchen can look healthy on that line while the building is still unpaid. Which items Anthropic excludes, and how large they are, was not part of the message.

The missing piece is the size. A positive line with no dollar figure cannot be set against the previous quarter, or against the $190–200 billion of 2028 revenue the listing case reportedly leans on. In our view, picking the adjusted line as the profitability claim is itself informative: it is the measure where the heaviest costs of building models sit outside the frame.

What the third quarter has to show

The claim covers quarters already closed, so the next checkpoint is whether the streak reaches three and whether a number comes with it this time. No date has been given for the listing, and a confidential filing of the kind Sacra describes keeps the financials out of public view until it converts to a public one. Until then, the 2028 projection is the yardstick the run rate gets measured against.