Here is a number that should have stopped the AI industry cold this week: Anthropic closed July with an annualized revenue run rate of $65 billion. The company shared the figure with investors over the weekend, three sources confirmed, and Bloomberg was first to report it. The pace is roughly seven times where Anthropic stood at the end of 2025.
I have spent the past year covering AI hype with a skeptical eyebrow, so let me be clear about what changed my mind. These are real customers paying real money for Claude. Anthropic also reported preliminary second-quarter revenue above $11.5 billion, up from $787 million in the same quarter a year earlier. Fourteen-fold growth in one year is not a narrative. It is a compounding machine.
Here is the part that matters even more: the company posted positive adjusted operating income for the quarter. Anthropic, once written off as the ethical also-ran in a two-horse race, is now operating at a profit on an adjusted basis before its IPO. That is the rarest sentence in AI in 2026.
The Growth Is Real. So Is the Bottleneck.
Anyone can grow fast by giving a product away. Anthropic is growing fast while charging, and the run rate trajectory is staggering:
- $9 billion annualized run rate at the end of 2025
- $47 billion by May 2026
- $65 billion by the end of July 2026
- OpenAI's comparable run rate: just over $40 billion
Here is the trap I keep coming back to: demand is growing faster than Claude can be served. Real Vision founder Raoul Pal told Benzinga that Claude is "utterly unusable" at times and warned that Anthropic needs more inference capacity fast, or it will lose the users it fought so hard to win.
When an investor says your product is unusable, you do not fix it with marketing. You fix it with chips, clusters, and seriously expensive engineering.
The $6 Billion Answer Is a Wrench
That is the story behind this week's other headline. Bloomberg reported that Anthropic is in talks to acquire Decart AI for around $6 billion, the largest acquisition in company history. Decart is an Nvidia-backed Israeli startup that builds software to squeeze more compute out of existing AI chips, and its team would reportedly join Anthropic's inference and performance organization.
Decart's profile explains the price tag:
- Founded in 2023 by Dean and Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev
- Raised $300 million in May led by Radical Ventures, with Nvidia among the backers
- Valued near $4 billion just months before the reported $6 billion offer
The premium over the last valuation shows how desperate every AI lab is for inference efficiency. Anthropic has also committed $9.1 billion to Riot Platforms for data center capacity. This is a company quietly buying the future it needs rather than waiting for it to arrive.
What I'd Watch Before the IPO
Anthropic filed confidentially with the SEC in June and could debut on Wall Street as soon as this fall, ahead of OpenAI. At a reported valuation near $965 billion, the market is pricing in years of continued growth. I am not convinced that is wrong, but I am watching three things:
- Gross margins: the Decart deal and data center commitments are expensive, and margin pressure will be the first thing IPO analysts attack
- Compute supply: every degraded session is a churn event, and June's disruption, when Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 were temporarily disabled over an export control directive, showed how fragile the story can get
- Execution bandwidth: running a 14x-growth business while negotiating a $6 billion acquisition and preparing to go public is a lot of balls in the air
Here is my bottom line. The $65 billion run rate is the most important number in AI this month, and it belongs to a company most people still call the runner-up. Anthropic has turned the corner from promising to profitable. The question is no longer whether it can generate demand. It is whether it can generate the compute to keep up with it.
That is the real race now, and it is one Anthropic is spending billions to win.
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