SemiAnalysis: Anthropic’s Q3 Profit Expected to Exceed $1 Billion
- Core Thesis: Anthropic, leveraging its high-margin API business model and blockbuster product Claude Code, has achieved explosive growth in the B2B AI market. Its profitability far surpasses OpenAI, and it is now pursuing an IPO to raise funds to address computing power bottlenecks, thereby reshaping the competitive landscape of AI commercialization.
- Key Elements:
- Anthropic is projected to achieve $1 billion in GAAP earnings before interest and taxes by the third quarter of 2026. Its ARR has surged from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $60 billion. If the growth rate is maintained, ARR could reach $300 billion by the end of 2027.
- Claude Code is the core driver of growth, accounting for over 7% of GitHub code commits. It has propelled monthly ARR additions from $3 billion in January to $11 billion in March.
- Business models are markedly diverging: approximately 75% to 85% of Anthropic’s ARR comes from API usage-based billing, whereas over 65% of OpenAI’s revenue relies on a subscription model. The API model has the advantage of no per-user revenue cap.
- Gross margin advantages are significant: Anthropic’s blended gross margin has risen to the mid-60% range (with API exceeding 80%), compared to being -94% in 2024; at a comparable scale, OpenAI’s gross profit would be approximately $25 billion less due to supporting a large number of free users.
- Cybersecurity is seen as the next explosive vertical after programming, while TaaS (Token as a Service) models, sold through hyperscale cloud platforms, already account for 15% to 20% of ARR.
- Computing power is the primary constraint, with demand expected to exceed 100 GW by 2030. The IPO carries strategic urgency, aimed at accelerating financing to secure computing resources and capitalizing on the capital markets window.
Original Author: Xu Chao
Original Source: Wall Street News
A recent analysis by research firm SemiAnalysis reveals that Anthropic is reshaping the commercialization landscape of AI with profitability and growth rates that far surpass its competitors. Leveraging a high-margin, API-centric business model, Anthropic has become the leader in the B2B AI market.
According to an in-depth report from SemiAnalysis, Anthropic is expected to achieve $1 billion in GAAP earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) by the third quarter of 2026, corresponding to a margin of approximately 6%. Meanwhile, its Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) has surged from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $60 billion currently. The firm predicts that if Anthropic maintains a pace of roughly $15 billion in net new ARR (NNARR) per month, its ARR could reach $300 billion by the end of 2027, implying an enterprise value of $6 trillion and making it the highest-valued company globally.
Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1st. SemiAnalysis believes the timing carries strategic urgency—Alphabet has completed $84.75 billion in equity financing, and Meta has also signaled plans for tens of billions in funding, narrowing the capital market window. The report notes that Anthropic's superior financial data and business model mean it should list before OpenAI to seize the initiative in the capital competition.
Claude Code Ignites the B2B Market, ARR Triples in a Single Quarter
Anthropic's performance inflection point stems from the explosive adoption of Claude Code. SemiAnalysis data shows that Claude Code currently accounts for over 7% of all code commits on GitHub, directly propelling the company's monthly new ARR from $3 billion in January to $11 billion in March of this quarter.
In terms of revenue structure, there is a significant divergence between Anthropic and OpenAI. Approximately 75% to 85% of Anthropic's ARR comes from usage-based API business, while consumer subscriptions account for only 5% of total ARR. In contrast, over 65% of OpenAI's revenue in the first quarter of 2026 still came from subscription models, with consumer ARR accounting for about 40%.
SemiAnalysis points out that the core advantage of the API model lies in having no cap on revenue per user—as the same customer adopts more agentic workflows, their token consumption and corresponding revenue will continue to grow, allowing for expansion without acquiring new customers. Anthropic's CFO, Krishna Rao, disclosed on a podcast in May this year that the company's Net Revenue Retention (NRR) rate is as high as 500%. This means that among the customers contributing $30 billion in ARR in the current quarter, that same cohort contributed only $2 billion a year ago.
Gross Margin Advantage Creates a Compounding Flywheel, OpenAI Falls Significantly Behind
The difference in business models is directly reflected in gross margins. SemiAnalysis estimates that Anthropic's current blended gross margin has risen to the mid-60% range, compared to negative 94% in 2024. The gross margin for its API business exceeds 80%.
The primary driver for this significant improvement in gross margin is the increase in inference efficiency. Measured by ARR per megawatt of compute, Anthropic's metric is expected to reach $60 million later this year, up from $16 million nine months ago. Since inference compute costs are largely fixed, when the number of tokens processed per unit of compute or token pricing increases, the marginal profit margin approaches 100%.
The report calculates that if both Anthropic and OpenAI were to reach an ARR of $100 billion, OpenAI would have approximately $25 billion less in gross profit than Anthropic due to the need to support over 900 million free users (SemiAnalysis estimates a monthly service cost of ~$0.70 per user). This gap will directly impact their ability to reinvest in training next-generation models.
SemiAnalysis introduced "Earnings Before Training and Interest Taxes" (EBTIT) as a core metric for gauging a lab's reinvestment capacity. Anthropic's EBTIT margin in Q2 2026 was 36%. The report predicts that by 2028, Anthropic's cumulative EBTIT will exceed that of OpenAI by $250 billion.
Beyond Coding, Cybersecurity May Be the Next Growth Engine
SemiAnalysis estimates that currently, over 65% of lab ARR comes from coding-related use cases. Coding tool startups like Cursor, Cognition, Loveable, and Replit collectively contribute about $6 billion in ARR. Meta is Anthropic's largest single customer, but its share is still between 3% and 5%.
The report believes that cybersecurity will be the next explosive vertical after coding, and it anticipates that the release of the new Fable model will further increase token pricing and expand application scenarios, pushing monthly NNARR beyond the current $10 billion per month level in the second half of 2026. Verticals such as healthcare, finance, and biotechnology are also listed as potential major TAM expansion directions.
In terms of distribution channels, the "Token-as-a-Service" (TaaS) model, sold indirectly through hyperscale cloud platforms like AWS Bedrock and Azure Foundry, is growing rapidly. It now accounts for 15% to 20% of Anthropic's ARR, up from just 5% to 10% a quarter ago. SemiAnalysis believes that paying a 20% to 30% revenue share to hyperscale cloud platforms remains economically rational from the perspective of enterprise customer reach and compliance convenience.
Compute Bottleneck is the Biggest Variable, IPO Provides Funding Channel
The core constraint facing Anthropic's growth prospects comes from compute supply.
SemiAnalysis predicts that by 2030, the combined unconstrained compute demand of Anthropic and OpenAI will exceed 100 gigawatts (GW). In contrast, net new compute supply in 2025 and 2026 will be only 2.5GW and 5GW respectively, and the combined available compute for both companies currently stands at just over 6GW.
It is this supply-demand gap that gives the IPO its clear strategic significance. The report notes that the funds raised from the listing will primarily be used to fill the widening gap in compute demand for running inference and training new models, and to secure compute resources in advance at more favorable financing costs. The report also mentions that Meta is considering renting out its compute to external parties (based on market rumors from July 1, 2026) and expects Anthropic to procure incremental compute from such trusted suppliers.
SemiAnalysis also lists key risk factors, including: OpenAI's rumored price cuts, competitive pressure from Google DeepMind and Meta in coding models, potential government regulatory restrictions on the release of frontier models, and the dilutive effect of the rising share of TaaS revenue on overall gross margins. The report explicitly states that if the regulatory system hinders model releases and narrows the capability gap between open-source models and leading proprietary models, it would fundamentally erode Anthropic's commercial moat.
