Anthropic is approaching its first profitable quarter, with revenue jumping 130 percent to $10.9 billion in Q2, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Just last summer, Anthropic told investors not to expect annual profits before 2028. Now the company projects an operating profit of $559 million for the June quarter. That puts Anthropic's growth ahead of Zoom during the pandemic or Google and Facebook before their IPOs, the WSJ reports.
The main driver is Anthropic's coding tools, which companies worldwide have adopted en masse since the start of the year. On top of that, there's "agentic" use of Claude, tasks where the model works on its own over longer periods. Demand at times exceeded compute capacity, forcing Anthropic to throttle access for some users and sign new data center deals, including one with Elon Musk's SpaceX.
AI usage is getting pricier, and Anthropic benefits
On the cost side, agentic AI is a token hog, especially for coding. There's also a hidden price driver in the new flagship model: Anthropic's Opus 4.7 costs the same per token as its predecessor, but significantly more per request. The culprit is a new tokenizer that breaks the same text into up to 47 percent more tokens. For an example session of 80 rounds, developer Abhishek Ray calculated cost increases of roughly 20 to 30 percent. An OpenRouter analysis confirms real-world cost increases of 12 to 27 percent for prompts over 2,000 tokens.
