Anthropic hits $3B in annualized revenue as enterprise AI adoption grows

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic has reached a major milestone in the race to commercialize generative AI. The company hit an annualized revenue run rate of $3 billion, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The number, which extrapolates the company’s current sales over 12 months, is proof of the growing appetite for AI in enterprise settings. It's also a sharp leap from just six months ago. In December 2024, Anthropic’s run rate was near $1 billion, rising to $2 billion by March before crossing the $3 billion mark at the end of May, one source said.

The surge is being seen as early validation of generative AI’s business potential, particularly in areas like code generation. Unlike consumer-focused rival OpenAI, which has seen massive success with its ChatGPT subscriptions, Anthropic is becoming the AI partner of choice for enterprises integrating AI into their infrastructure and workflows.

“Enterprise demand is what’s driving this,” one source said. “Companies are moving from AI pilots to production-level deployment, and Anthropic is positioned well for that shift.”

The company’s Claude family of models, known for strong performance in programming and reasoning tasks, has been a major growth driver. Anthropic sells access to these models via APIs and cloud partners, including Amazon and Google, two of its biggest investors. The firm is now being described by at least one venture capitalist as the fastest-growing SaaS company on record.

“We’ve looked at the IPOs of over 200 public software companies, and this growth rate has never happened,” said Alex Clayton, general partner at Meritech Capital. Though not an investor in Anthropic, Clayton noted that traditional SaaS giants like Snowflake took more than six quarters to grow from $1 billion to $2 billion in run-rate revenue, while Anthropic did it in just over two.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodeiarlier. This year, the company raised $3.5 billion at a valuation of $61.4 billion, solidifying its place among the top-tier players in the generative AI space. That’s still a fraction of OpenAI’s $300 billion valuation, but the revenue momentum signals that Anthropic is carving out its lane.