Anthropic revenue jumps 45% to $16.8 billion in a quarter as Claude maker prepares a share sale

Anthropic's revenue rose 45% to $16.8 billion in the three months to the end of September, the BBC reported on Thursday, citing figures the company is understood to have shared with prospective investors at its San Francisco headquarters on Wednesday. At today's interbank rate on our dollar rate page (Rs 276.95), that is about Rs 4.65 trillion in a single quarter.

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models, declined to comment to the BBC. The briefing is groundwork for what is expected to be one of the largest share sales of the year, due by the end of 2026.

Anthropic's quarterly revenue in 2026

That is more than three and a half times the first-quarter figure in six months. The jump from the second quarter to the third (45%) was smaller than the one before it, when revenue more than doubled.

Why investors are watching the numbers

AI companies are spending heavily on data centres, chips and power, and the revenue of the two biggest model makers, Anthropic and OpenAI, is one of the few public signs of whether that spending is paying for itself.

The timing is awkward. On Wednesday and Thursday, hardware stocks tied to AI sold off hard after hotter-than-expected US inflation raised the chance of another Federal Reserve rate rise. In Seoul, SK Hynix fell more than 10% and Samsung Electronics 7.1%, and in Tokyo SoftBank dropped 7.9%, CNBC reported, as investors worried that higher borrowing costs would make AI data centres harder to finance.

OpenAI is not listing this year

Rival OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, is also expected to list eventually, at a valuation the BBC says could exceed $1 trillion. But chief executive Sam Altman said in September that OpenAI will not go public in 2026 while it deals with concerns about the technology's safety. That leaves Anthropic on course to be the first of the two on the stock market.

What it means for users in Pakistan

Claude, like ChatGPT, is sold in dollars, and paid plans are billed on Pakistani bank cards with the bank's exchange rate plus any tax on foreign card payments. If you pay for an AI subscription, check your card statement against the USD to PKR converter to see what you are actually paying in rupees each month.