Anthropic targets $26 billion revenue by 2026 on strong AI demand

AI startup Anthropic is forecasting its revenue to surge, targeting to nearly triple its annualized revenue to as much as $26 billion by 2026, amid growing demand for AI, sources familiar with the matter.

The San Francisco-based AI startup is currently enjoying a rapid adoption of its products by enterprise customers, fuelling the ambitious revenue projections, as per sources cited by Reuters. Apart from strong AI demand, the projections are also reflective of the growing investor confidence and growth in the generative AI sector, even as spending especially in infrastructure buildout comes under scrutiny.

Anthropic eyes rapid expansion supported by enterprise customers

Anthropic is currently on course to meet its internal goal of $9 billion annual revenue run rate by end of this year, according to the two sources who requested to remain anonymous to discuss private financial matters. The sources further revealed that for this year, the company has set a base target of more than doubling its revenue to $20 billion, with a best case reaching as much as $26 billion.

While Anthropic declined to comment of the projections, the company confirmed to Reuters that its current annual revenue run rate is approaching $7 billion this month, a significant increase from the $5 billion it reported in August.

Anthropic, which is also a top rival for OpenAI, the ChatGPT maker, was recently valued at $183 billion after raising $13 billion in a series F funding round led by ICONIQ. The AI startup on Wednesday launched a new version of its cheapest AI model, Haiku as part of a broader effort to appeal to companies that are looking for capable AI systems that are cheaper than its more advanced models.

The latest model – Haiku 4.5 reportedly sells for about one third the price of Sonnet 4, one of its medium-sized models.

Anthropic’s expansion is being spurred by a widespread uptake of its enterprise products. Recently professional services giant Deloitte inked an agreement to deploy Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude, to its more than 470,000 employees across the globe. The deal marked the largest enterprise deployment of the AI assistant to date, deepening a relationship the two firms first established in 2024.

Anthropic currently serves more than 300,000 businesses and enterprise customers, contributing about 80% of its total revenue. Its models like Claude family of large language models, are sold via application programming interfaces (APIs). A notably successful tool is Claude Code, a code generation assistant, achieved an annualized revenue run rate of nearly $1 billion since its launch earlier this year, according to one of the sources.

Its ambitious growth forecasts positions it as a strong competitor to OpenAI, which announced in August that it had surpassed $13 billion in annualized revenue and is aiming to exceeding $20 billion by end of this year driven by ChatGPT growth. The chatbot has over 800 million active users.

Anthropic has been expanding its sales to governments and growing outside the US. The company revealed in August that it would offer its Claude to the US government for $1.

Anthropic is also targeting to open its first office in Bengaluru in India next year, its second largest market after the US and aims to triple its international workforce. It is also aiming to expand its applied AI team fivefold this year to meet rising demand for AI products and services.

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