5 Interesting Learnings from Anthropic at $17 Billion in Quarterly Revenue: $5.4B Added vs. $6.8B the Quarter Before, 900% NRR, and $895 Billion in Compute Commitments - saastr.com
By Google News AI ·
by Jason Lemkin | 5 Interesting Things, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blog Posts, Scale
Anthropic filed its amended S-1 this week, with audited Q3 numbers that replace what leaked from October’s investor day. Revenue rose to $16.96 billion from $11.56 billion in the second quarter. That is up 1,127% from $1.38 billion a year earlier and 47% from the second quarter. The cost side, the customer base, and the commitments are where the new information is.
The quarterly sequence: $4.73 billion in the first quarter, $11.56B in Q2, $16.96B in Q3. Growth from the first to the second quarter was reportedly 140%. Q3 was 47%.
The dollar add matters more than the percentage. Q2 added $6.83B over Q1. Q3 added $5.40B over Q2, down about 21%.
The scale is still unmatched. The Q3 increase alone is close to Snowflake’s full-year revenue guide. Nine-month revenue was $33.24 billion, against $4.59 billion in calendar 2025. Q3 annualizes to about $68B.
The bar was set higher. Investors expect Anthropic to reach $110 billion in annualized revenue by year-end, according to The Wall Street Journal. Getting there from $68B would take a Q4 dollar add more than double Q3’s. The Q4 number to watch is the dollar add, since the percentage will keep falling either way.
Anthropic posted an operating loss of $567 million in the third quarter, compared with operating income of $974 million in the second quarter.
The filing explains the swing. Total third quarter operating expenses reached $17.5 billion, driven by $5 billion in higher cost short term compute and a $2 billion noncash charge from its employee donation matching program. Compute bought under short-term commitments costs much more than capacity under its multi-year deals.
Compute and infrastructure expenses jumped 78% sequentially…
Originally published by Google News AI