Anthropic made $16.8 billion in a quarter. Investors still want a discount.

Anthropic told prospective investors at an investor day at its San Francisco headquarters on October 14 that third-quarter revenue rose 45% from the previous quarter to $16.8 billion, Reuters and Bloomberg reported, citing people who attended. Revenue was $4.7 billion in the first quarter and $11.6 billion in the second. The company also said it was profitable in the third quarter on an adjusted basis. Reuters said the sources did not explain how Anthropic defines that. Anthropic did not comment.

The haggling starts

On October 15, Reuters reported that some current and prospective investors who attended were weighing a lower valuation for the planned November share sale. Three people told the news agency that some attendees discussed around $1.5 trillion, down from the roughly $2 trillion investors had previously expected. The reason given: growth is slowing. Revenue more than doubled from the first quarter to the second, then rose 45%.

The mood outside did not help. Reuters noted a tech selloff that hit chipmakers and cloud providers, with shares and bonds of CoreWeave tumbling on Thursday. In September Reuters reported that Anthropic's prospectus showed a $42 billion loss for 2025 and at least $518 billion in commitments for cloud services, computing and infrastructure over a decade.

Our math, and our read

Our arithmetic, not the company's: $16.8 billion a quarter is a run rate of about $67 billion a year. At $1.5 trillion, buyers would pay roughly 22 times that. At $2 trillion, roughly 30 times.

Opinion: calling 45% growth in a single quarter a slowdown sounds absurd, and in any normal industry it would be. But Anthropic is not being priced like a normal company. It is being priced as the first public test of whether the AI build-out pays for itself. Investors who were promised a rocket are now negotiating over whether it is merely a very fast plane.

The listing is expected after the US midterm elections, Reuters has reported. Whatever price it lands on will set the mood for OpenAI's own expected listing next year, and for everyone still borrowing to build data centers.