Anthropic has reported a dramatic rise in revenue just days before its planned initial public offering. According to documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, quarterly revenue increased by 1,100 percent from $1.4 billion to $17 billion. Revenue in the first quarter had stood at $2.5 billion, while the company generated total revenue of $33.2 million during the first three quarters of the year.
Despite the growth, Anthropic remains deeply loss-making. The company has accumulated losses of $104 billion since the start of the year. In the third quarter alone, it reported a loss of $23.3 billion against revenue of $17 billion. Most of the deficit resulted from an accounting adjustment, while the operating loss was $567 million.
The filings indicate that the company’s deficit is narrowing, although spending on IT infrastructure, particularly data centres, rose by 77 percent in the third quarter compared with the second quarter, outpacing revenue growth. Anthropic has also committed to spending around $895 billion, primarily on expanding computing capacity. Most of that expenditure is expected to take place over the next five years.
Anthropic is moving toward an IPO in the coming weeks, potentially overtaking OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, which is not planning a share offering this year.
The company’s Claude AI assistant competes with ChatGPT as well as products from technology groups including Google, Microsoft and Meta. The scale of Anthropic’s planned investment comes as concerns over whether the industry’s huge artificial intelligence spending can generate sufficient returns have grown again. The risks associated with the technology have also become the subject of renewed debate following independent hacking attacks carried out using AI software.
Sources: Der Spiegel.