--- title: Anthropic's growth just flattened | daily.dev description: Anthropic's revenue growth has slowed sharply despite a headline-grabbing Q3 number, Henry Blodget argues. Q3 revenue was reportedly $16.8 billion, up 45%... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/anthropic-s-growth-just-flattened-lgzpiui7y twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Anthropic's growth just flattened | daily.dev og:description: Anthropic's revenue growth has slowed sharply despite a headline-grabbing Q3 number, Henry Blodget argues. Q3 revenue was reportedly $16.8 billion, up 45%... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/anthropic-s-growth-just-flattened-lgzpiui7y og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/LGzPIUI7y.png og:image:alt: Anthropic's growth just flattened og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Anthropic's growth just flattened **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 4 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Anthropic's revenue growth has slowed sharply despite a headline-grabbing Q3 number, Henry Blodget argues. Q3 revenue was reportedly $16.8 billion, up 45% sequentially, down from 141% growth in Q2. Using a reported $65 billion annualized run-rate in July (about $5.4 billion for the month), Blodget estimates Anthropic grew only modestly in August and September. Monthly growth dropped from about $760 million per month in Q2 to $580 million in Q3. He notes Anthropic did not share a September annualized revenue figure, and suggests the slowdown is likely another reason neocloud stocks like CoreWeave are collapsing amid AI bubble concerns. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What was Anthropic's reported revenue for Q3 2026? Anthropic's Q3 2026 revenue was reportedly $16.8 billion, a 45% sequential increase. That followed $11.6 billion in Q2 (up 141% sequentially) and $4.8 billion in Q1. The dollar increase in Q3 ($5.2 billion) was smaller than the Q2 increase ($6.8 billion), despite the higher base. _Investors weighing AI spending bets can track revenue trend breakdowns like these on daily.dev._ ### Is Anthropic's monthly revenue growth slowing down? Yes, estimates suggest Anthropic's monthly revenue growth flattened sharply in August and September. Using a reported $65 billion annualized run-rate in July (about $5.4 billion that month) against $16.8 billion total Q3 revenue, Anthropic appears to have grown only modestly across the following two months, compared to average monthly growth of about $760 million in Q2 versus $580 million in Q3. _Anyone gauging whether AI infrastructure spending will keep climbing can follow revenue trend analysis like this on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 201 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-11-03). **TL;DR:** Discussion is split between people impressed by Opus 5.5's coding capability and others who are skeptical of Anthropic's valuation, revenue sustainability, and whether growth deceleration signals deeper trouble ahead of an IPO. **Sentiment:** 20% positive · 35% mixed · 45% skeptical **The case for** - Several developers report Opus 5.5 significantly improved their coding workflows and even reduced their spend by needing fewer retries. - Some argue the S-1 financials show inference is profitable and margins are strong, undercutting subsidization concerns. - A few see the model's expansion into non-coding domains (analog electronics, chemistry) as evidence of continued real capability growth. **The pushback** - Many argue the valuations require implausibly massive future revenue and margins that don't match current unit economics. - Commenters note heavy price competition from cheaper models (Chinese labs, Sol/GLM) is squeezing Anthropic's premium positioning. - Several say companies are actively cutting AI token spend and tightening usage, pressuring revenue growth. - Skepticism that most non-coding jobs or average consumers actually benefit from or notice new model releases. - Some view the IPO timing and selective reporting of Q2 vs Q3 numbers as a sign management is aware growth is slowing. **By community** - hackernews (heated): A long, contentious thread mixing genuine enthusiasm for Opus 5.5's coding ability with deep skepticism about Anthropic's valuation, margins, and the sustainability of its revenue growth. **Hottest debate:** Whether Anthropic's valuation and spending commitments are justified by realistic future margins and revenue, or represent an unsustainable bubble. **Open questions** - Can Anthropic reach the profit margins needed to justify its valuation and capex commitments? - How much of current revenue growth is driven by genuine model capability gains (e.g., Opus 5.5) versus one-off usage spikes or subsidized pricing? - Will enterprise customers continue paying a premium for Anthropic's models as cheaper competitors close the capability gap? **Highlights** > > If they can do 25% margins, This is the assumption we disagree on. They're net negative by an order of magnitude on most of their current customers. I don't see them flipping to break even + 25%. Further you're assuming they can turn that on today, when they're still very clearly not ready. Every year the timeline gets worse. Take them to 2% margin with 8 years to go and you're looking at needing 4.5t annual. This is normally where I'd say "but 2% feels extreme..." and hedge in the middle, but like...the current pricing isn't even close to 25% margin, it's not even close to break even. > — [Eji1700 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50346134) > They're net negative by an order of magnitude on most of their current customers. From the S-1, in the first 3 quarters of 2026 their revenue was $33.2B and compute costs were $18.8B. Inference is highly profitable, they "just" need more of it. > — [orangecat on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50346913) > > That doesn’t require continent-scale anything. Wha??? There are 13 companies in <>, on the <>, that make more than that: https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-revenue/ Most of those needed decades to reach this point. Anthropic has a near-clone in OpenAI (and vice versa). There are multiple smaller competitors, several much cheaper (especially the Chinese models). Anthropic obviously needs continent-scale balance sheets, I would argue "multiple continent-scale balance sheets", since Google & co make their money by selling everywhere except for China. Anthropic and OpenAI are never entering China on a massive scale. US relations with Europe are deteriorating and LLMs are < risks in an adversarial relation so it's not inconceivable Europe at some point starts marginalizing US tech companies, at least LLM labs. I imagine India will want to do something similar at some point. Where exactly is Anthropic going to make all that steady revenue from, if it can't break out of coding and cybersecurity? Even worse, both those markets are super tech savvy so those cheap rivals are even more dangerous. One slip up the next 5+ years and Anthropic is history. > — [oblio on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50346160) > > they are still clearly in the lead on coding and will continue to do well until someone definitively passes them. I think the first implying the second might be a bit of a stretch. At some point, companies are going to start looking at their AI spending and start negotiating deals. OpenAI is right behind them and Anthropic is around 8x more expensive (Sol 6.1 vs Opus 5.5 based on Artificial Intelligence's cost per task; cost per token is a somewhat useless metric when different models use vastly different numbers of tokens for the same thing). Chinese models like Deepseek 4.1 Flash are cheap, can be self-hosted, and while certainly behind Claude Opus 5.5, are still good. Lots of companies buy "inferior" products like Microsoft Teams. Over the next 5 years, it seems likely that many models will get really good to the point that people often won't be able to tell any difference. Even if something isn't "definitively" better, companies might say "our engineers can't tell the difference and we're cutting our costs by 85%." It's not absurd to think that a company would use its own harness or an open source harness and/or put a proxy in to route requests variably. For two months, they have engineers using different models unbeknownst to them and they measure things like how often the engineers have to correct or redirect the model. At the end of two months, they might find little difference in performance and switch to a much lower cost model. It's not like it'd be crazy hard to analyze workers frustration as they did their jobs and figure out if one model was actually better. They could log all the conversations and it's not like AI can't easily determine things like "no, that's completely wrong" as a phrase showing that the agent was really off base. I think a big part of the next 5-10 years is going to be about cost/efficiency. > — [mdasen on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50345783) > He says a lot of things, but one specific thing I remember from weeks ago is that he said Anthropic growth slowed on Q3, and that's why they decided to push for the IPO (and use only Q2 numbers). > — [lbrito on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50346080) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50344958) · 159 points · 201 comments --- Tags: [#anthropic](https://daily.dev/tags/anthropic) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/anthropic-s-growth-just-flattened-lgzpiui7y) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Anthropic's growth just flattened","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/anthropic-s-growth-just-flattened-lgzpiui7y","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/anthropic-s-growth-just-flattened-lgzpiui7y"},"datePublished":"2026-11-02T23:51:23.299Z","dateModified":"2026-11-03T02:25:28.132Z","description":"Anthropic's revenue growth has slowed sharply despite a headline-grabbing Q3 number, Henry Blodget argues. 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