Anthropic’s revenue surged to more than USD 11.5 billion in the second quarter, highlighting the rapid expansion of the Claude chatbot maker as it prepares for a potential blockbuster initial public offering (IPO).
The company reported preliminary quarterly revenue of more than USD 11.5 billion, compared with USD 787 million a year earlier and USD 4.73 billion in the first quarter of 2026, according to documents seen by Bloomberg News.
The sharp increase comes as Anthropic competes with OpenAI for corporate customers, with its artificial intelligence (AI) tools gaining traction among professionals, particularly for coding and other business applications.
The growth is central to preparations for a potential IPO, with bankers and investors reportedly looking well beyond Anthropic’s current financial performance to determine its value.
Investors and bankers are using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on those forecasts, an approach typically associated with high-growth software companies that have yet to establish mature profit margins.
Anthropic is spending heavily on computing capacity, model training, inference, and hiring. Investors are effectively betting that revenue will eventually grow faster than those expenses, allowing margins to expand as the company scales and AI infrastructure becomes more efficient.
Anthropic has been holding high-level meetings with prospective investors ahead of a potential listing, although discussions have not yet focused on a specific valuation. The company has reportedly filed confidentially and is working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan on the offering.
A public listing could give Anthropic access to billions of dollars in additional capital to fund computing infrastructure, advanced chips, and specialised data centers. It would also position the company among the first major private AI firms to tap public markets.
An IPO could come as early as this autumn, potentially putting Anthropic ahead of OpenAI and Chinese AI company DeepSeek, which are also reportedly preparing for public-market listings.
The AI boom has helped revive global IPO activity, with new listings raising USD 256.4 billion this year, excluding blank-cheque companies and other financial vehicles, according to Bloomberg data.
Anthropic is also in reported talks to buy Nvidia-backed startup Decart AI, as the Claude maker explores acquisitions that could help it handle growing industry demand ahead of its market debut. The deal could be worth about USD 6 billion.
Decart is known for developing AI infrastructure and optimization technology as well as its AI models. Its flagship Lucy model can edit live video in real time. The startup has also developed Oasis, a model that generates simulated environments to train and test robotics and autonomous-driving systems.
The deal is in an early stage and, if completed, will result in Decart’s team joining Anthropic’s inference and performance organistion.
Decart, in May 2026, raised USD 300 million in a funding round led by Radical Ventures, with Nvidia joining as a new investor.
Apart from eyeing the Decart acquisition to grow its computing power and overcome capacity constraints for its services, Anthropic is also hiring engineers with experience across the hardware and software stack.