The Math Behind Anthropic’s Mad Revenue Growth - The Information

Anthropic is reporting $19 billion in annualized revenue. Its own chief financial officer told a federal court the number is $5 billion.

Both figures are technically accurate. The distance between them is the actual story.

On March 9, Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao swore in a declaration that the company's revenue "has exceeded $5 billion to date" — a number The Information first reported, drawn from a filing in the company's ongoing dispute with the federal government over its supply-chain risk designation. Rao, a former Airbnb Global Head of Corporate and Business Development who helped steer the company through the COVID-19 pandemic, is not known for underselling. In a filing where Anthropic was trying to impress a federal court with its commercial scale, you would expect him to reach for the biggest defensible number. "Exceeding $5 billion" is conspicuously conservative — Zitron's analysis at Flyingpenguin notes it signals a real figure much closer to $5 billion than to $6 billion.

Three weeks earlier, Anthropic told the public something very different. On March 3, the company announced its annualized run-rate had surpassed $19 billion — up from $9 billion at the end of 2025 and roughly $14 billion a few weeks before that. The trajectory is extraordinary: a company that disclosed $1 billion in annualized revenue in January 2025 is now claiming $19 billion, a 19x jump in fifteen months.

So what explains the gap?

The answer is arithmetic, not deception — but the arithmetic is doing real work. Run-rate revenue is not GAAP revenue. It is an extrapolation: take the last 28 days of consumption-based billing, multiply by 13, then add monthly subscription revenue multiplied by 12. Reuters Breakingviews, which spoke to people familiar with Anthropic's methodology, explains the formula this way. It is common in the industry, but Breakingviews notes that large enterprises account for roughly 80 percent of Anthropic's revenue and tend to be billed on a consumption basis, making the headline run-rate highly sensitive to short-term usage spikes.

This is where the numbers get uncomfortable. If you add up the ten annualized revenue figures Anthropic has publicly disclosed since January 2025 — $1 billion, $1.4 billion, $2 billion, $3 billion, $4 billion, $5 billion, $7 billion, $9 billion, $14 billion, $19 billion — Zitron calculates that the implied cumulative revenue through early March is approximately $6.66 billion. That is the floor, not the ceiling, because each disclosed figure represents a point-in-time snapshot that would have undercounted subsequent growth. Even so, it implies something striking: if total GAAP revenue sits in the range Rao suggested — call it $5.1 billion to $5.9 billion — then approximately 85 percent of everything Anthropic has ever earned came in the last 100 days. You have to believe the company's business was essentially non-existent for its first four years and then suddenly processed 85 percent of its lifetime volume in a single quarter.

Anthropic's growth rate is real, and it is remarkable. The company says its run-rate has grown more than 10x annually over the past three years — compared to OpenAI's estimated 3.4x, per Reuters Breakingviews. At that trajectory, annualized revenue could approach $43 billion by mid-2026, Zitron estimates based on Epoch AI data. These are not small numbers for a company that raised a $30 billion Series G in February at a $380 billion post-money valuation and has spent over $10 billion training and deploying its models.

But the run-rate is a snapshot of a moment, not a guarantee of a trend. When a company's implied cumulative GAAP revenue is $6.66 billion but its annualized run-rate is $19 billion, the gap between what's real today and what is being projected matters. The question is whether the next 28 days look like the last 28 days — and whether, for a company whose revenue is concentrated in a handful of large enterprise customers, any single quarter's consumption figure is a reliable guide to the next.

Thiyagu Ramasamy, Anthropic's head of public sector, told Wired that a financial services customer paused negotiations over a $15 million deal specifically because of the supply-chain designation, and two leading financial services companies have refused to close deals worth a combined $80 million unless they gain the right to unilaterally cancel their contracts. Ramasamy said Anthropic expected over $500 million in annual recurring revenue from the public sector in 2026; the company now estimates that figure will fall by $150 million due to the Pentagon dispute.

Rao's conservative court filing — "exceeding $5 billion" rather than a number closer to $6 billion — might be the most honest data point in the entire picture. A CFO with his background, trying to demonstrate commercial scale to a federal court, reached for the most defensible number rather than the most impressive one. That restraint is itself a signal. When the person closest to the money is the most careful with the math, the rest of us should pay attention to what the $19 billion run-rate is not telling us.