Anthropic is telling investors it's booked a second straight profitable quarter

Anthropic has privately confirmed to shareholders it will post positive adjusted operating income in Q3, following Q2 revenue that hit $11.5 billion, up more than fourteen-fold on the year, as the Financial Times reported. Compute costs per revenue dollar fell from $0.71 to $0.56 over that period, which is doing most of the work behind the roughly 5% operating margin. The adjusted figure strips out stock-based compensation, so the GAAP picture may look considerably less flattering, and analysts at outlets like AInvest have already called the profitability claim partly an illusion. None of that will matter much to IPO marketing: a two-quarter streak is exactly the story bankers want to tell against a backdrop of OpenAI's operating losses widening to $12.3 billion in the same period.