Anthropic is on track to hit $10.9 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2026, doubling its first-quarter figure of $4.8 billion. Alongside that revenue comes a projected operating profit of $559 million, which would mark the first profitable quarter in the company’s five-year history.
As recently as last summer, Anthropic told its investors it might not reach full-year profitability until 2028. The company ended 2025 with roughly $9 billion in annualized revenue. By April 2026, that run-rate had already crossed $30 billion. With Q2 projections pointing to $10.9 billion in a single quarter, the company is tracking toward a $43 billion annualized run rate.
What Is Driving Anthropic’s Revenue?
Enterprise demand and adoption has been the biggest factor. Following the company’s Series G fundraise in February, it was discovered that more than 1,000 business customers were spending over $1 million on Claude annually, a figure that doubled from 500 in under two months.
Claude Code, the company’s agentic AI coding tool, hit $1 billion in annualized revenue within six months of its public launch and had reached $2.5 billion in annualized revenue by February 2026. Enterprise customers including Netflix, Spotify, KPMG, L’Oreal, and Salesforce are among those deploying the tool.
Consumer adoption has also played a role. The Claude app shot to the top of Apple’s App Store in February after a widely covered dispute with the Pentagon, and Anthropic has since been working to rebuild that relationship, particularly following the launch of Claude Mythos Preview, a model the company says has advanced cybersecurity capabilities.
Why the Profit Figure Deserves Scrutiny
The timing of the Anthropic-SpaceX compute deal calls for scrutiny. Anthropic recently signed a compute contract worth $1.25 billion per month with SpaceX through May 2029, confirmed in SpaceX’s own S-1 IPO filing. The deal includes a deliberate ramp-up discount for May and June before the full rate begins in July. Q2 covers April, May, and June, meaning Anthropic’s single largest compute expense is running at a reduced rate for two of the three months it is using to declare its first operating profit.
Anthropic has also been explicit with investors that profitability may not hold for the full year, with many reports stating that the company’s planned spending on compute infrastructure for late 2026 and 2027 is likely to swing operating results back into negative territory.
All of these taken together, the so-called Q2 profit is better understood within the context of favorable timing (SpaceX compute deal) as opposed to a solid shift in the company’s underlying economics.
Where Anthropic Now Stands Against OpenAI
OpenAI has told investors it expects to reach profitability in 2030, after spending more than $600 billion on computing infrastructure. Anthropic reaching operating profit, even for a single quarter, puts it ahead of that benchmark by several years.
Anthropic is currently in talks to raise at least $30 billion at a valuation exceeding $900 billion, which would place it above OpenAI’s last known private market valuation at $852 billion. The company is also planning a potential IPO for October this year.
Whether Anthropic can hold its profitability position through the rest of the year will depend largely on how quickly its new compute capacity comes online against what it is already spending.
