SemiAnalysis: Anthropic's Third-Quarter Profit Expected to Exceed $1 Billion
- Core Thesis: Leveraging its high-margin API business model and blockbuster product Claude Code, Anthropic has achieved explosive growth in the B2B AI market. Its profitability far surpasses OpenAI, and it is pursuing an IPO to address compute bottlenecks and reshape the competitive landscape of AI commercialization.
- Key Elements:
- Anthropic is expected to achieve $1 billion in GAAP EBIT by Q3 2026. Its ARR has surged from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $60 billion. If growth rates are sustained, ARR could reach $300 billion by the end of 2027.
- Claude Code is the core growth driver, accounting for over 7% of GitHub code commits. It propelled the monthly ARR increase from $3 billion in January to $11 billion in March.
- Business models diverge significantly: Approximately 75%-85% of Anthropic's ARR comes from API usage-based billing, while over 65% of OpenAI's revenue relies on subscription models. The API model offers the advantage of no single-user revenue ceiling.
- Clear gross margin advantage: Anthropic's blended gross margin has risen to the mid-60% range (API over 80%), compared to negative 94% in 2024. At a comparable scale, OpenAI would have approximately $25 billion less in gross profit due to supporting a large number of free users.
- Cybersecurity is seen as the next explosive vertical after programming, while the TaaS (Token-as-a-Service) model, sold through hyperscale cloud platforms, already accounts for 15%-20% of ARR.
- Compute power is the primary constraint, with demand expected to exceed 100GW by 2030. The IPO holds strategic urgency, aimed at accelerating fundraising to secure compute resources and capitalize on the capital markets window.
Original Author: Xu Chao
Source: Wall Street CN
A new analysis from research firm SemiAnalysis reveals that Anthropic is reshaping the AI commercialization landscape with profitability and growth rates far exceeding its competitors. Leveraging a high-margin, API-centric business model, Anthropic has become the frontrunner in the B2B AI market.
According to an in-depth report from SemiAnalysis, Anthropic is expected to achieve $1 billion in GAAP EBIT by Q3 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 net new ARR (NNARR) run rate of roughly $15 billion per month, its ARR could reach $300 billion by the end of 2027, implying an enterprise value of $6 trillion and making it the world's most valuable company.
Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1. SemiAnalysis believes there is strategic urgency in going public now—Alphabet has completed $84.75 billion in equity financing, Meta has also signaled plans for tens of billions in funding, and the capital markets window is narrowing. The report points out that Anthropic's superior financial data and business model mean it should go public before OpenAI to seize the initiative in the capital race.
Claude Code Ignites B2B Market, ARR Triples in a Quarter
Anthropic's turning point stems from the explosive adoption of Claude Code. SemiAnalysis data indicates that Claude Code now accounts for over 7% of all code commits on GitHub, directly propelling the company's monthly net new ARR from $3 billion in January to $11 billion in March.
In terms of revenue structure, Anthropic and OpenAI show marked divergence. Approximately 75% to 85% of Anthropic's ARR comes from usage-based API billing, with consumer subscriptions accounting for only 5% of total ARR. In contrast, over 65% of OpenAI's revenue in Q1 2026 still came from subscriptions, with consumer ARR accounting for about 40%.
SemiAnalysis notes that the core advantage of the API model lies in the absence of a per-user revenue cap—as the same customer adopts more agentic workflows, their token consumption and corresponding revenue will continue to grow, enabling expansion without needing new customers. Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao disclosed on a podcast in May 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 Q1, that same cohort of customers had contributed only $2 billion a year earlier.
Gross Margin Advantage Creates a Compounding Flywheel, OpenAI Lags Significantly
The difference in business model 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 API business specifically boasts a gross margin exceeding 80%.
The primary driver behind this significant gross margin improvement is enhanced inference efficiency. Measured by ARR per megawatt of computing power, this metric for Anthropic is expected to reach $60 million later this year, up from just $16 million nine months ago. Since inference compute costs are largely fixed, when the amount 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 reach $100 billion in ARR, OpenAI's gross profit would be approximately $25 billion less than Anthropic's, due to the need to support over 900 million free users (SemiAnalysis estimates the monthly service cost per user is around $0.70). This gap will directly impact their ability to reinvest in training next-generation models.
SemiAnalysis introduces "Earnings Before Training and Interest Tax" (EBTIT) as a core metric for measuring a lab's reinvestment capacity. Anthropic's EBTIT margin in Q2 2026 reached 36%. The report predicts that cumulative EBTIT for Anthropic will exceed OpenAI's by $250 billion before 2028.
Beyond Coding, Cybersecurity Could Be the Next Growth Engine
SemiAnalysis estimates that currently, over 65% of Anthropic's ARR comes from coding-related use cases. Coding tool startups like Cursor, Cognition, Lovable, and Replit collectively contribute about $6 billion in ARR. Meta is Anthropic's single largest customer, but its share remains between 3% and 5%.
The report argues that cybersecurity will be the next explosive vertical after coding, and expects the launch of the Fable model to further increase token pricing and expand application scenarios, pushing monthly NNARR beyond the current $10 billion level in the second half of 2026. Verticals like 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 hyperscaler 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 hyperscalers remains economically reasonable given the reach and compliance convenience for enterprise customers.
Compute Bottleneck is the Biggest Variable, IPO Provides Financing Channel
The core constraint facing Anthropic's growth prospects is compute supply.
SemiAnalysis predicts that by 2030, the combined unconstrained compute demand of Anthropic and OpenAI will exceed 100 gigawatts (GW). However, net new compute additions in 2025 and 2026 are only 2.5GW and 5GW, respectively. Currently, the combined available compute for both companies is just over 6GW.
It is this supply-demand gap that gives the IPO clear strategic significance. The report states that funds raised from the listing will primarily be used to fill the widening gap in compute demand between inference operations and training new models, and to secure compute resources at more favorable financing costs. The report also mentions that Meta is considering renting out 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 reported price cut plans, competitive pressure from Google DeepMind and Meta in coding models, potential government regulatory restrictions on frontier model releases, and the dilutive effect of the rising TaaS revenue share on the blended gross margin. The report clearly states that if the regulatory framework hinders model releases and narrows the capability gap between open-source models and frontier proprietary models, it would fundamentally undermine Anthropic's business moat.
