Anthropic is growing faster than almost anyone expected, and the numbers are starting to look almost absurd. The company’s annualized revenue run rate crossed $65 billion at the end of July, according to TechCrunch, up from $47 billion in May and just $9 billion at the end of last year. That’s not linear growth. That’s something closer to vertical.
For context, OpenAI doubled its own revenue to $40 billion over roughly the same stretch. That would be a headline number for almost any other company. But next to Anthropic’s trajectory, it reads as the slower story. Both figures rely on annualized run rates, and the two companies may calculate those metrics differently, so direct comparisons need some caution. Still, investors are clearly more excited about where Anthropic is heading than where OpenAI is.
The reason this matters goes beyond bragging rights. Both companies have filed confidential IPO paperwork, and Anthropic is expected to hit the public markets first, possibly as early as this fall. The Financial Times reports that Anthropic is targeting a public valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would make it the largest market debut on record. That is a staggering number, especially for a company that was valued at $965 billion as recently as late May, when it closed a $65 billion funding round.
Anthropic’s investors expect the company to finish 2026 somewhere between $100 billion and $120 billion in annualized revenue. If that holds, the IPO pricing conversation becomes very different from what anyone was modeling even six months ago. A $2 trillion valuation at $120 billion in revenue implies a multiple of roughly 16x forward revenue, which is aggressive but not irrational if the growth rate holds.
What’s driving the numbers? Claude has gained serious traction in enterprise settings, competing directly with OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini. Anthropic has also built a reputation for prioritizing safety and interpretability research, which has resonated with regulated industries and large organizations that need something more than raw capability. That positioning is different from OpenAI’s, and it appears to be converting into real revenue at scale.
The bigger picture here is that the AI infrastructure market is consolidating around a small number of players faster than most analysts predicted. Anthropic and OpenAI are pulling away from the rest of the field. For developers and enterprise buyers evaluating which platform to build on, that concentration is worth paying attention to.
