Thursday, December 4, 2025

How Anthropic grew—and what the $183 billion giant faces next

Anthropic’s numbers are astonishing—yes, even by AI standards. And the company is now reportedly looking at an IPO.

It’s still early days, but Anthropic has reportedly tapped law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati to explore a public debut, according to the Financial Times.

If you think about it, Anthropic has come very far in a short time with limited name recognition compared to rivals like Google and OpenAI. Today, Anthropic is frequently seen as the favorite in enterprise AI. Valued at $183 billion (for the moment), Anthropic is on track to hit an annualized revenue run rate of nearly $10 billion by the end of 2025—and has told investors that figure could reach $70 billion by 2028. Headcount has surged too, from around 500 employees in late 2023 to about 2,300 today.

If you’re wondering how they’ve come so far so rapidly: In our latest Fortune cover story, AI editor Jeremy Kahn explores what’s driving Anthropic’s growth—and the pricing and efficiency pressures that loom over the company. Here’s one part that caught my eye:

Even more remarkably, Anthropic is generating such growth without spending nearly as much as some rivals—at a time when massive capital expenditures across the industry are stoking anxiety about an AI bubble. (OpenAI alone has signed AI infrastructure deals worth more than $1 trillion.) That’s in part because Anthropic says it has found ways to train and run its AI models more efficiently. To be sure, Anthropic is nowhere near profitable today: It was pacing to end 2025 having consumed $2.8 billion more cash than it took in, according to recent news accounts citing forecasts provided to investors. But the company is also on track to break even in 2028, according to those projections—two years ahead of OpenAI.

On the AI infrastructure spending race, [Dario] Amodei can be sardonic. “These announcements are kind of frothy,” he says. “Business should care about bringing in cash, not setting cash on fire, right?” Of his rivals, he quips: “Can you buy so many data centers that you over-leverage yourself? All I’ll say is, some people are trying.”

Anthropic’s bet on enterprises puts it both right in the crosshairs of rivals, and its commitment to AI safety has made it a target in Trump’s Washington. And the challenges of hypergrowth are often discussed, almost as a given, but I found myself thinking about it more as I was reading this story. I was especially drawn to what Daniela Amodei said about it, as Jeremy writes:

“I have probably been the leader who’s been the most skeptical and scared of the rate at which we’re growing,” Daniela Amodei tells me. But she says she’s been “continually, pleasantly surprised” that the company hasn’t come apart at the seams, culturally or operationally.

She says the fact that all seven cofounders still work at Anthropic helps, because it seeds cultural hearth-tenders across different parts of the company. She also says that the company’s AI safety mission tends to draw a certain type of person. “We’re like umami,” she says. “We have a very distinct flavor.”

Read the whole story here.

You saw it first in Term Sheet…We broke the news this year of usage-based billing startup Metronome’s Series C. This week, Stripe announced it had acquired the company, and Upstarts Media reports the price tag on the deal: $1 billion.

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Venture Deals

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- Supper, a New York City-based AI-powered platform designed to clean enterprise data, raised $11 million in seed funding. USV led the round and was joined by Inspired Capital, Box Group, Torch, and Avid.

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- Ridley, a Newark, Del.-based AI-powered real estate platform for sellers, raised $6.4 million in seed funding. Fifth Wall led the round and was joined by 1984 Ventures, 1Sharpe Ventures, Moxie Ventures, and others.

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- Arcturus, a San Francisco and Halifax, Nova Scotia-based volumetric video platform that films sports events for 3D broadcasting, raised $2.3 million in seed funding. LDV Capital led the round and was joined by Myelin VC and others.