Anthropic, the company behind Claude, told prospective investors on Wednesday that its revenue rose 45 per cent to $16.8bn (£12.7bn) in the three months to the end of September, the BBC understands.
The briefing, held at its San Francisco headquarters, lays the groundwork for a stock market listing expected before the end of the year. The company reportedly also said it had been profitable for a second quarter in a row. A spokesperson declined to comment.
The trajectory
The figure matters less on its own than in sequence. Anthropic's revenue this year ran $4.7bn in the first quarter, $11.6bn in the second, and $16.8bn in the third.
Alongside OpenAI's numbers, this is one of the few public gauges of whether the AI industry can actually finance the infrastructure it is building.
The timing is the story
The briefing landed in a bad week for exactly that question.
US tech stocks fell on Wednesday over concerns about AI spending. Shares in AMD, Nvidia and Intel fell sharply. On Thursday morning in Asia, Japan's SoftBank dropped more than 9 per cent, Samsung fell 9.4 per cent and SK Hynix 10.8 per cent. Trading on South Korea's Kospi and Kosdaq was temporarily halted after falls of more than 8 per cent, and Japan's Nikkei 225 fell over 5 per cent.
The trigger was partly Broadcom chief executive Hock Tan, who said at a conference in Singapore on Monday that many investors have "no clue" and have set "extreme expectations only to find out that it's almost like they are in a casino". US inflation data on Wednesday, showing September price rises accelerating more than expected, deepened the falls.
Two readings, and they do not agree
One: Anthropic's numbers are the answer to the doubt. Revenue tripling inside a year, with profit, is evidence the spending has a business underneath it.
Two: a company releasing strong figures to private investors days before a listing, in a week when the market is reconsidering the whole sector, is doing what any company would do with that timing. The figures are reported rather than audited and public, which is the distinction to hold.
Both can be true, and the listing is where the two meet.
What it means in Bangladesh
The share prices are remote; one number in that list is not. SK Hynix and Samsung are memory manufacturers, and their fall came in the same week we reported that global smartphone shipments dropped 20 per cent because AI infrastructure is absorbing memory chips.
That is the chain in one place: AI companies raise money, the money buys memory, the memory shortage raises phone prices in Dhaka. A market that stops believing the first step eventually relieves the third — which means the sell-off that looks like bad news for Anthropic is, for a phone buyer here, the first sign of pressure easing.
Not quickly, though. Memory contracts are signed months ahead, so a bad week in Seoul reaches Elephant Road a long time later, if at all.
On what the company itself said about its own risks, see the leaked IPO prospectus.
Source: BBC News.
