Anthropic is set to turn its first quarterly profit while its AI rivals keep incinerating mountains of cash.
According to the Financial Journal the San Francisco AI outfit has told investors it expects revenue of $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026. That is more than double the $4.8 billion it posted in the first three months of the year.
The surge should push Anthropic to an operating profit of $559 million for the period. That would put it ahead of OpenAI and xAI, which are still splashing billions on models, data centres and the compute needed to keep the AI circus running.
The milestone suggests AI labs can run something resembling a sustainable business, even while growth is roaring and costs are still bonkers. It gives Anthropic a useful bragging chip as it tries to outpace xAI founder Elon Musk and OpenAI chief Sam Altman in the race to go public this year.
Anthropic is close to closing a $30 billion funding round that would value it at $900 billion. Anthropic and OpenAI have both hit annualised revenues in the tens of billions of dollars with impressive speed.
OpenAI has told investors it expects to become profitable in 2030. Before that happens, the company expects to spend more than $600 billion on computing power to scale and run its models.
OpenAI was targeting a public listing as soon as September to raise more capital, according to people familiar with its plans.
xAI, now merged with SpaceX, has poured billions into data centres and hardware. SpaceX, which is set to go public next month, revealed on Wednesday that its AI business had racked up an operating loss of $6.4 billion.
Anthropic’s margin improvement does not mean it has escaped the cash furnace. The company is unlikely to stay consistently profitable as it increases spending on computing power to meet rising demand for its products.
Anthropic has signed a deal to spend $15 billion a year on computing power from SpaceX, according to the rocketmaker’s prospectus filed with US securities regulators. It has agreed longer-term deals with Google and Amazon that could add hundreds of billions more in spending in the coming years.
The company has been exploring an IPO and hired the law firm Wilson Sonsini last year to explore a flotation. Such a listing would rank alongside SpaceX and OpenAI as one of the largest ever, assuming the market does not sober up first.
