In a data leak published by The Wall Street Journalthe artificial intelligence laboratory founded by the Amodei brothers has informed its investors that it will close the second quarter of 2026 with revenues 130% higher than those of the first quarter of the year. It is a colossal achievement that also achieves something unusual for these companies: they will have an operating profit of 559 million dollars.
They earn more than they spend. According to these data, the company will reach $10.9 billion compared to $4.8 billion in the first quarter. Its quarterly growth rate already exceeds Zoom during the pandemic or those that Google and Facebook had before their stock market increases. It is quite a breath of fresh air for an industry accused of being a gigantic bubble.
The rivals, fatal. While Anthropic gives the big surprise, the rest of the competitors are still in a good financial situation. For example, OpenAI confessed to its investors that does not expect to see benefits until 2030. It didn’t work out well for xAI either, which carries losses of 6.5 billion due to investments in data centers.
How did they achieve it?. To achieve this milestone, Anthropic has differentiated its strategy from the beginning. It has focused mainly on companies that pay for the intensive use of its agentic tools (Claude Code) and its APIs (Claude Opus/Sonnet 4.7). It also uses chips from manufacturers such as Google and Amazon, and has managed to optimize its spending in the cloud. It is therefore more focused and it is more efficient than its rivals, and that has had a clear effect on its balance sheet.
Mythos as reputational success. In recent months Anthropic has fought several political and media battles and seems to have emerged victorious from all of them. Have Pentagon attempt rejected By controlling how its AI models were used was a clear boost to that brand image. But also the launch of its Mythos model It has been especially striking because although it is not publicly accessible, it does not stop giving headlines that seem to confirm that what Anthropic said (“it is so good that we better not release it”) was true.
But. Although the figures are promising, there are nuances in these estimates. Not being a public company, Anthropic uses accounting methods that benefit it in this forecast. For example, it includes as direct revenue the sales of its models through its partners, such as AWS or Google Cloud, something that OpenAI does not do. In addition, it excludes stock compensation for its employees and these results do not guarantee that this profitability will be maintained throughout the year.
We will see more quarters in red. The profit achieved would be extraordinary for many companies, but it is pocket change for Anhtropic. The company recently committed to spending $15 billion in SpaceX computing capacity using Colossus clusters. At the moment everything indicates that these benefits will be temporary and the company will return to red numbers. And yet, its evolution is currently more positive than that of OpenAI, against which it has not stopped winning battles for some time.
In Xataka | Nvidia’s financial results are simply dizzying. And it still hasn’t sold a single chip in China
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings