Anthropic tells investors it expects to be profitable again ahead of planned Nasdaq IPO

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models, has told investors it was profitable in the third quarter. The timing is notable: the disclosure lands just as the company gears up for a planned public listing on Nasdaq. Specifically, Anthropic expects to post positive adjusted operating income for Q3 2026. That would make it the second consecutive profitable quarter for a company that, not long ago, was better known for how fast it burned cash than for how fast it made it. The numbers behind the pitch The first profitable quarter came in Q2 2026. Preliminary revenue for that period exceeded $11.5 billion. A year earlier, the comparable figure was approximately $787 million. The company’s annualized revenue run rate reached approximately $65 billion as of late July 2026. At the end of 2025, that figure sat at roughly $9 billion. Most of that growth has come from two places. The first is usage-based API access, where developers and businesses pay according to how much they use Claude. The second is subscription services aimed at individual and professional users. Blended gross margins are projected to exceed 50% throughout 2026. Recent updates put gross margins above 80% when par...