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Hi,
I sent this to members of our AI Investment Brief a couple of hours ago. How we understand the numbers leaking from top AI labs matters too much to keep only for our finance readers, so I’m sharing my synthesis below. Let me know your thoughts.
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Anthropic’s much-anticipated private investor briefing predictably leaked within minutes.
The numbers would be extraordinary at any time. But they rang out like the thud of an auditor’s ledger at the Christmas party.
And the markets are feeling it: can this AI trade really pay off?
As we write, Korea’s KOSPI is down 7.57% today and 16.2% this month. Tech stocks aligned with the AI trade will open sharply lower.
Let’s take you through what we see.
Third quarter revenues of $16.8bn, almost 4x the entirety of 2025. Those quarterly revenues exceeded the company’s forecast for all of 20261. Based on the quarterly growth rate, Anthropic’s annualized third-quarter exit revenue would be $76bn per annum. Leaks suggest net revenue retention is around 900%, meaning customers who spent $1 a year ago now spend about $9. This implies that demand is deepening.
It will reach $50bn in annual revenue in just five years. Google and Meta took 14 years; Apple and Microsoft more than 30.
The economics are improving with scale. Anthropic makes $1.70 for every $1 it spends on compute. It posted an 85% adjusted gross margin in a quarter when it engaged in a price war with OpenAI, its biggest rival, faced low-cost competition from China, and saw a shift among early-adopting tech firms toward cost management.
An adjusted operating margin of 11%, even as the company poured 44% of revenues into computing for research and development.
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And yet it’s a miss.
It’s a miss because expectations had run riot, anchored on a leak in July suggesting a $65bn annualized revenue number. The extraordinary Q2 got the party started; Claude Code, TokenMaxxing, and new Opus models propelled the firm well ahead of targets. Anthropic’s investor communications were unhelpful in setting market expectations to say the least.
But that Q2 was far from the norm; it was an aberration. Reversion to the mean was likely. And that reversion has come. We were caught off guard by Anthropic’s revenue acceleration in Q1 and Q2 this year. It ran counter to the trend; we expected quarterly revenue growth this year to be much slower than last year.
Put this in context. Year-on-year growth is about 1,000%. Second-quarter to third-quarter revenue growth is still 45%, but first-quarter to second-quarter revenue growth was 147%. On a spreadsheet, it’s clear as day: a deceleration.
But which quarter is the outlier? The healthy Q1, the extraordinary Q2 or the disappointing Q3? Did Q1 and Q2 represent a pulling forward of revenue from later in the year? In other words, did the firm bring forward permanent customer growth? Or is the current lower growth rate the company’s new baseline? Or the start of a more significant shift to lower growth amid price cuts and competition? It’s hard to imagine a world where only one of those reasons is the whole story; more likely each has played a role.
Can Anthropic hit $60bn revenue for the full year? To do so would mean $26.9bn in Q4 and 60% quarter-on-quarter growth, something they achieved in Q1 and Q2 but not in Q3. It is a very tall ask and will depend on exit-revenue momentum from September and their ability to turn more customers into higher spenders for the rest of the year. If Q4 grows as well as Q3, the full year will close out at $57.5bn; to get to $60bn they will need to do even better. Anthropic will have an opportunity to signal its trajectory when its S-1 finally goes public.
Expectations aside, what do the numbers tell us about Anthropic’s ability to meet and exceed its future obligations? As it stands, Anthropic’s annualized growth rate in Q3 is around 340% per annum: enough to clear any hurdle. The question becomes: at what rate will that growth taper over the next 2 to 3 years? The slower the taper, the better the business. The converse, of course, is also true.