By Milana Vinn and Krystal Hu
NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 14 (Reuters) - Anthropic told prospective investors on Wednesday that revenue in the third quarter surged 45% from the prior quarter, two people who attended an investor day said, a move that could assuage market concerns about the huge costs of developing AI systems.
Revenue in the third quarter rose to $16.8 billion from $11.6 billion in the second quarter and $4.7 billion in the first quarter, the people said. Anthropic told the group the company
was profitable on an adjusted basis in the third quarter, they added.
The meeting in San Francisco was meant to familiarize prospective Anthropic investors with the company before its highly anticipated IPO.
The IPO is expected to precede a public listing by rival OpenAI, making Anthropic an early test of investor appetite for heavily unprofitable AI developers pursuing massive scale. Its public-market debut is likely to be pushed until after the November US midterm elections, Reuters has reported.
Attendees at Wednesday's event met with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao and came away optimistic about the company's rapid revenue growth and path to profitability, a few of them told Reuters as they left its headquarters in the evening.
Amodei reiterated the company’s focus on AI safety but avoided mentioning threats of human extinction, one person in the group said. In its prospectus seen by Reuters last month, Anthropic warned that advanced AI could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity."
On Wednesday, however, Anthropic executives talked about how the company was using its AI to help its own business including designing a custom chip. The company handed out hats to the attendees, some of which read "thinking."
The company is expecting a $110 billion annual revenue run rate by the end of the year, another person who attended the event said.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Scrutiny of AI companies' finances has intensified as they pour money into chips, data centers and computing power needed to develop and operate increasingly powerful models.
Targeting a valuation of over $2 trillion, Anthropic is seeking to convince investors that its breakneck revenue growth can eventually outrun the enormous costs of building and running AI systems.
Last year, Anthropic's revenue increased twelvefold to nearly $4.6 billion, even as the company lost more than $8 billion on an operating basis, excluding writedowns of various liabilities mostly tied to previous fundraising, Reuters reported exclusively last month.
The company has committed at least $518 billion over a decade for cloud services, computing and infrastructure.
Founded by former OpenAI executives, Anthropic has emerged as one of the leading generative AI developers with its Claude family of models. Its expansion has been underpinned by Alphabet's Google and Amazon, which are simultaneously investors, suppliers of computing power and important distribution partners, as well as AI competitors.
Anthropic has also sought to distinguish itself through its focus on AI safety, warning of the dangers posed by increasingly capable systems even as it competes in the race to develop and commercialize more powerful models.
Its research has found that its own AI agents have engaged in troubling behavior in test environments, including leaking sensitive information and sabotaging code, though the company has said it has not seen evidence of such misalignment in real-world deployments.
The Financial Times first reported the third-quarter revenue figure on Wednesday.
(Reporting by Milana Vinn in New York and Krystal Hu in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Echo Wang and Anhata Rooprai; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh, Matthew Lewis and Jamie Freed)
