Anthropic booked more than $11.5 billion of revenue in the second quarter of 2026, a roughly 14-fold jump from the $787 million it recorded in the same quarter a year earlier, according to preliminary documents shared with prospective investors and reviewed by Bloomberg News. It was also the company’s first quarter of positive adjusted operating income.

The sequencing matters. Q1 2026 revenue was $4.73 billion; the Q2 number brings first-half booked revenue to roughly $16.2 billion, per Forbes, already comfortably above the roughly $10 billion Anthropic recorded for all of 2025. CNBC reports the annualized run rate crossed $47 billion in May, which, if the comparison is apples to apples, would put the Claude maker ahead of OpenAI’s disclosed $40 billion-plus run rate. The two companies may calculate the metric differently.

Anthropic has filed confidentially for a listing and is working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan on a potential fall debut, Bloomberg reported. That would put it on the tape ahead of OpenAI and possibly ahead of DeepSeek, which people familiar with the matter say could file as soon as this year.

The Fortune report notes an Anthropic representative declined to comment; CNBC says the company didn’t immediately respond. Early investor meetings, per CNBC, have been high-level: no specific financials, no target valuation, deliberations ongoing.

Read structurally, the disclosure is a bookrunner’s document doing bookrunner’s work. Preliminary financials leak, comparables get set, the OpenAI benchmark gets planted alongside the DeepSeek race-to-file. The IPO window in AI has effectively been called open by the party best positioned to walk through it first.

Sources