Anthropic's revenue just hit $11.5 billion in one quarter, and the OpenAI rivalry just got a lot more real

Anthropic just posted a number that makes most quarterly earnings look like pocket money.

The company's preliminary Q2 2026 figures show revenue topping $11.5 billion, more than double the $4.73 billion it pulled in during Q1 and a fourteen fold jump on the same quarter last year, when it made $787 million. It also reported its first ever positive adjusted operating profit. For a company that was burning cash a couple of years ago, that is a genuinely wild turnaround.

Anthropic is the outfit behind Claude, the AI model sitting quietly behind a huge chunk of workplace chatbots, coding tools and customer service bots most people never think to name. Its annualised revenue run rate had already crossed $47 billion back in May, largely off the back of businesses paying for coding assistants and AI agents rather than casual chat subscriptions.

The timing is not an accident. Anthropic confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the SEC back on 1 June, and banks including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan have spent July lining up investor meetings ahead of a planned listing as early as September or October. Reports have the post money valuation from its last funding round sitting around $965 billion, with some analysts throwing around trillion dollar chatter for when it actually lists.

That timeline matters because OpenAI, Anthropic's biggest rival and the company most people still think of first when they hear "AI," has reportedly pushed its own IPO from this year back to 2027. If Anthropic's listing goes to plan, it gets to the public markets first, with a profit story to tell while its main competitor is still working on one.

Worth flagging that these are preliminary numbers and could shift before anything is finalised. Anthropic has not confirmed further detail beyond the figures reported.

Still, going from a company most Australians could not have named eighteen months ago to a near trillion dollar IPO contender beating OpenAI to the punch is the kind of plot twist that makes the AI money race actually worth watching. Grab a seat, this rivalry is only getting louder from here.