Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, just posted a growth number most startups can only dream of.
Bloomberg News reported Friday that the company's preliminary second-quarter revenue topped $11.5 billion, a more than 14-fold jump from the prior-year quarter, according to documents viewed by Bloomberg.
To see how fast that is, look at where the company started. A year earlier, the same quarter brought in just $787 million, and in Q1 2026 Anthropic recorded $4.73 billion.
Put another way: Anthropic reported about $10 billion in total revenue for all of 2025, and the latest quarter alone came in above that.
Even for the AI sector, which has gotten used to big numbers, that kind of growth stands out.
That kind of growth is exactly why the still-private company is drawing investor attention as it gears up toward a possible stock market debut, according to Bloomberg News.
The documents also indicated that Anthropic achieved a positive adjusted operating result in the second quarter. Those figures are preliminary, though, and could still change. Anthropic had no immediate comment when CNBC asked about the report.
Anthropic is chasing the same corporate clients as OpenAI. Claude's tools are gaining traction among professionals who use them for coding and other daily work, and that demand is showing up in the revenue numbers.
In May, Anthropic said its annualized revenue run rate had climbed above $47 billion, compared with about $10 billion in total revenue for all of 2025.
Anthropic is private today, but that could change soon. According to sources who spoke to CNBC's David Faber, the company has held early, high-level meetings with prospective investors, without going into specific financials or valuation.
CFO Krishna Rao is leading those conversations.
Should a listing happen in the fall, Anthropic would be among the first big AI firms to enter the public market. A listing would open a deep pool of investment dollars, giving the company the financial capacity to cover rising computing costs, buy advanced hardware, and construct specialized data centers.
Why go public at all? For Anthropic, an IPO would raise billions to cover the costs of running a top-tier AI business - computing power, hardware, and data centers. AI is a brutally expensive business, and those expenses do not shrink. The money has to come from somewhere.
Public investors are the deepest pool of money around. An IPO would also make Anthropic's finances public, so investors could finally see exactly how fast this growth really is.
The trajectory also highlights how quickly the AI market has consolidated. Today, it is generating quarterly revenue that rivals established enterprise software giants, and its growth rate shows no signs of slowing.
What does that mean for your portfolio? Right now, regular investors cannot buy Anthropic stock, since the company is private. An IPO would change that, giving everyday investors a rare chance to own a piece of one of the biggest names in AI.
