Anthropic's First-Half Revenue Rose 1,300%. Should You Buy the Stock When It Starts Trading?

The company behind Claude finally showed investors its numbers this week. Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic (NASDAQ:ANT) filed publicly for its initial public offering (IPO) on Monday, and its sales for the first six months of 2026 were $16.3 billion, up 1,300% from $1.2 billion in the same stretch of 2025. That half-year total was over 3.5 times the $4.6 billion it booked in all of 2025.

The company plans to list its stock on the Nasdaq under the symbol "ANT." But the filing leaves the price range, the share count, and even third-quarter revenue blank.

In May, Anthropic said it raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation. And recent media reports say the company is seeking a valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in the offering.

Is Anthropic stock a buy when it starts trading? I think the business has earned the excitement, but the price being floated asks a lot of it.

Image source: Getty Images.

Speeding up again

Anthropic's quarterly revenue rose from $376 million at the start of 2025 to $2.0 billion by year-end. Growth from quarter to quarter slowed along the way, from around 109% to 48%. Then it sped back up. Revenue surged around 132% from the previous quarter to $4.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026, and by another 144%, to $11.6 billion, in Q2. That was almost 15 times the year-ago quarter's $787 million. Then growth cooled. Anthropic reportedly told investors in mid-October that third-quarter revenue climbed around 45% from Q2, to $16.8 billion. Multiply that by four, and it's running at around $67 billion a year.

Its base of bigger customers swelled, too. Customers bringing in $100,000 or more in revenue over the past 12 months rose from more than 950 a year before to more than 11,900 as of Sept. 30.

"We do not expect our revenue will continue to grow at comparable rates, and we cannot assure you that it will continue to grow at all," Anthropic said in the filing.

This warning may matter more than usual at the prices being discussed. The filing also estimates that 5% to 7% of revenue for January through September came from customers breaking its usage policy or commercial terms, revenue Anthropic expects to drop as it steps up enforcement.

Is Anthropic making money yet?

On an operating basis, it just started. Anthropic's second-quarter operating income was $974 million, an 8% operating margin, versus an operating loss of $1.2 billion a year before. It's the only profitable quarter of the six the filing shows.

Compute costs drove most of the improvement. Anthropic's compute and infrastructure expenses (mostly fees paid to cloud computing providers for capacity) grew to $5.6 billion in Q2. But that was just 48% of revenue, down from 177% a year before.

Granted, the first-half net loss was $80.7 billion. But $72.4 billion of it was a non-cash charge linked to the rising value of convertible notes and similar instruments -- a side effect of the surging valuation, not of running the business. Anthropic also had around $132 billion in cash and short-term investments at the end of June.

Still, demand could cool faster than the compute costs. Most of Anthropic's revenue is consumption-based (customers pay as they use Claude), and much of it isn't locked into long-term contracts, but its compute commitments usually span several years.

The price already assumes years of growth

At $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, buyers would be paying between 22 and 30 times sales, using that $67 billion annualized figure. Against about $35 billion in revenue over the 12 months through September (including that reported quarter), that's about 43 to 57 times sales.

The reported range is also about 55% to 107% above what private investors paid just five months before.

In other words, for a $2 trillion valuation to drop to a still-pricey 10 times sales, Anthropic would need yearly revenue of around $200 billion -- about three times its current pace. Getting there in three years would take growth of about 44% a year. Anthropic could do that at a fraction of today's pace. But there's little room for a slowdown along the way.

Anthropic's arguably one of the most impressive tech firms to go public in years. Revenue's still growing fast even after a reported third-quarter slowdown. And shrinking compute costs as a share of sales just carried the company to an operating profit.

But at the $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion being reported, I wouldn't buy shares on the first day of trading. At that level, buyers would be paying up front for years of growth that hasn't happened yet. A price range nearer to the $965 billion private investors paid in May would make the stock worth a look.

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