When your company is gearing up for one of the hottest IPOs in stock market history, you’d better believe investors and outside experts alike will be poring over your finances with a fine-toothed comb.
This is the situation AI lab Anthropic finds itself in during the run-up to its widely anticipated public offering. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic had told private investors its revenue had grown 45 percent to nearly $17 billion. That news came nearly a month after news broke that the AI company was bragging to investors that it was profitable — although only if you used a special accounting method that stripped out most of its expenses.
Yet as investors immediately noticed, that $17 billion revenue figure is a drop in the bucket compared to the kind of growth needed to sustain the firm’s anticipated $2 trillion valuation. As Business Insider notes, Anthropic’s third quarter income might look incredible on paper, but it falls far short of the growth needed to justify its 13-figure target.
“Not good enough,” a social media account belonging to market research blog Geiger Capital commented in a post. “It’s over.”
“Anyone remember this?” posted AI researcher and critic Gary Marcus, alongside a screenshot of a headline stating that Anthropic would need revenue of about $190-200 billion by 2028 to justify its valuation. “They ain’t gonna come close.”
After the revenue announcement, Reuters reported that some investors immediately began weighing a lower valuation of about $1.5 trillion, representing a $500 billion gap in Anthropic’s narrative.
Their concerns are understandable at this stage in the game, as the extremely high cost of the AI buildout is becoming increasingly difficult to justify. Whether Anthropic’s revenue growth trends upward — and steeply enough — is a crucial issue for the broader tech sector: in late September, a leaked IPO filing revealed that the company brought in $4.6 billion in revenue across 2025, but lost $42 billion.
Given that the AI lab has committed to spending some $518 billion on AI infrastructure over the next decade, though, the time for Anthropic to tap into explosive revenue growth was clearly yesterday.
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