Anthropic hits $3 billion in annualised revenue on business demand for AI

Anthropic is making about $3 billion in annualised revenue, according to two sources familiar with the matter

Artificial intelligence developer Anthropic is making about $3 billion in annualised revenue, according to two sources familiar with the matter, in an early validation of generative AI use in the business world.

The milestone, which projects the company's current sales over the course of a year, is a significant jump from December 2024 when the metric was nearly $1 billion, the sources said. The figure crossed $2 billion around the end of March, and at May's end it hit $3 billion, one of the sources said.

While consumers have embraced rival OpenAI's ChatGPT, a number of enterprises have limited their rollouts to experimentation, despite board-level interest in AI. Anthropic's revenue surge, largely from selling AI models as a service to other companies, is a data point showing how business demand is growing, one of the sources said.

A key driver is code generation. The San Francisco-based startup, backed by Google parent Alphabet and Amazon.com, is famous for AI that excels at computer programming. Products in the so-called codegen space have experienced major growth and adoption in recent months, often drawing on Anthropic's models.

This demand is setting Anthropic apart among software-as-a-service vendors. Its single-quarter revenue increases would count Anthropic as the fastest-growing SaaS company that at least one venture capitalist has ever seen.

"We've looked at the IPOs of over 200 public software companies, and this growth rate has never happened," said Meritech General Partner Alex Clayton, who is not an Anthropic investor and has no inside knowledge of its sales.

He cautioned that these comparisons are not fully precise, since Anthropic also has consumer revenue via subscriptions to its Claude chatbot. Still, by contrast, publicly traded SaaS company Snowflake took six quarters to go from $1 billion to $2 billion in such run-rate revenue, Clayton said.