Anthropic has told prospective investors it expects to record its first quarterly operating profit in the three months ending June 30, 2026, according to internal financial projections first reported by *The Wall Street Journal* on May 20 and subsequently corroborated by CNBC, Bloomberg and Reuters.
The numbers
<cite index="7-3,7-4,7-5">The company projects $10.9 billion in revenue for the June quarter, up 130% from $4.8 billion in the first quarter, and expects operating income of $559 million for the period.</cite> <cite index="5-11">The operating profit figure includes model training costs but excludes stock-based compensation</cite>, a treatment consistent with how several private AI labs report internal economics to investors.
<cite index="1-4">The internal projections were shared with investors ahead of a funding round</cite>. <cite index="5-12,5-13">Bloomberg first reported the talks, and TechCrunch later confirmed that Anthropic asked investors to submit allocations within 48 hours for what is expected to be roughly $50 billion in new capital. The company raised its last round in February at $380 billion.</cite>
The milestone arrives substantially ahead of prior guidance. <cite index="7-7">The numbers represent a sharp reversal from financial guidance Anthropic gave investors last summer, which suggested the company did not expect to turn a full-year profit until at least 2028.</cite>
Drivers
The primary growth engine is enterprise consumption of Claude and, in particular, the company's agentic coding product. <cite index="2-3">Claude Code surpassed $1 billion in annualized revenue within six months of its launch, driven by enterprise developers.</cite> <cite index="3-3">The number of customers spending over $1 million annually on Claude doubled from roughly 500 to more than 1,000 between February and April 2026 alone.</cite>
Large corporate deployments illustrate the shift from pilot to production. <cite index="5-15">Reuters reported that Bristol Myers Squibb is making Claude available to more than 30,000 employees for drug discovery, while TechCrunch noted that Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI among verified business customers on Ramp's spending data.</cite>
Unit economics have also improved. <cite index="5-17,5-18">Compute efficiency is improving alongside revenue growth. In the first quarter, Anthropic spent 71 cents on compute for every dollar of revenue.</cite> Chief Executive Dario Amodei has publicly acknowledged the pace of expansion, telling a developer conference earlier in May that revenue growth had become difficult to manage operationally.
Caveats
Anthropic itself flagged that the result may not extend across the full year. <cite index="7-8">Anthropic cautioned that it may not sustain profitability for the full year, given planned spending increases tied to computing infrastructure.</cite> Independent analysts have noted that the Q2 window coincides with favorable timing on certain hyperscaler compute commitments, and that costs are expected to step up in the second half as new training runs come online.
Market context
The disclosure lands amid intensifying capital-markets activity across frontier model developers. <cite index="7-9,7-10">The growth comes as Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX each pursue public listings that could value all three companies above $1 trillion. OpenAI may file IPO paperwork as early as this week, the Journal reported.</cite> <cite index="8-6">Anthropic itself is weighing a public listing as soon as October.</cite>
If the Q2 results land as projected when Anthropic reports to investors later this summer, the company will become the first independent Large Language Model (LLM) developer to demonstrate a profitable quarter at scale, a threshold that frontier labs have historically deferred in favor of reinvesting revenue into training compute.