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 partner revenue share and training costs are excluded.

Profitable, with an asterisk

The word “profitable” is carrying some weight here. Anthropic’s milestone is measured on an adjusted operating basis, not under standard GAAP accounting.

Under GAAP, the company continues to report significant losses. Those losses are tied to heavy compute spending and non-cash accounting charges.

The 2025 figures show how wide that gap can get. Anthropic generated approximately $4.6 billion in revenue that year.

It also recorded an operating loss of about $8 billion and a net loss near $42 billion. The bulk of that net loss stemmed from non-cash accounting items rather than money actually leaving the building.

The road to Nasdaq

Anthropic is targeting a Nasdaq IPO around mid-November 2026. Roadshow activities, where executives pitch the company to institutional buyers, are set to begin around November 9, 2026.

The listing could value the company at up to $2 trillion.

What this means for the AI IPO market

The compute bill is the obvious pressure point. Anthropic’s GAAP losses are tied directly to spending on computing power, and that spending is unlikely to shrink as the company trains more capable models and serves more customers.

Blended gross margins projected above 50% suggest the business is getting more efficient at delivering each dollar of revenue. The higher figure, above 80% when certain costs are excluded, shows what the economics could look like if partner revenue share and training expenses become a smaller slice of the pie.

Then there is valuation. A price tag of up to $2 trillion implies investors are paying for many years of continued expansion against a current annualized run rate of approximately $65 billion.