Anthropic tripled its revenue in 5 months - and this is why

Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic has hit $3 billion in annualized revenue, marking a 200% increase in just five months, according to a Friday report from Reuters. The news points to increasing demand among businesses for generative AI tools.

Anthropic's annualized revenue -- or its total projected earnings over the course of the year, assuming its current rate of income continues -- was close to $1 billion in December, according to the Reuters report, which cited anonymous sources close to the matter. It crossed the $2 billion threshold in late March and reached $3 billion last month.

Also: Anthropic's free Claude 4 Sonnet aced my coding tests - but its paid Opus model somehow didn't

Founded in 2021 by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, both former OpenAI employees, Anthropic has built its business model around its Claude family of generative AI chatbots. The company has also positioned itself as a leader in the responsible deployment of powerful AI tools. Following in the Amodeis' footsteps, a steady stream of OpenAI researchers has since left the company to join Anthropic, many of them citing a wish to work in an environment that prioritizes safety over speed.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Finding its niche

While OpenAI has dominated the market for consumer AI-facing products, most notably ChatGPT, Anthropic has focused on building its enterprise customer base. The company is, first and foremost, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor, though it also earns revenue via consumer subscriptions to Claude.

Its products are known for their prowess in writing computer code, one of the few truly tried-and-proven business applications for generative AI chatbots. Claude Opus 4, one of the newest models from Anthropic, was released last month and described in a company blog post as "the best coding model in the world."

Also: The best AI chatbots: ChatGPT, Copilot, and notable alternatives

Anthropic has also emphasized privacy and data security with its AI tools. Its enterprise customers, for example, have access to private cloud deployments and other cybersecurity features. In contrast to the free version of ChatGPT and ChatGPT Plus, in which users automatically opt in to have their interactions used for model training, Anthropic doesn't use such data without users' explicit consent.

All of this has added up to a rapid -- and apparently accelerating -- ascent for Anthropic within its particular niche. One venture capitalist quoted in the Reuters report said the company's growth since December is the quickest he has ever seen for a SaaS company.

A wave of automation

As businesses' use of AI grows, so too does the conviction that the technology will eventually automate a large portion of the workforce, which, in turn, could likely present new social and economic challenges.

In an interview with Axios last week, Dario Amodei warned that AI -- even as it fuels innovation in critical fields like health care -- could replace half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years.

Also: AI could erase half of entry-level white-collar jobs in 5 years, Anthropic CEO warns

While the impact of emerging tech upon the job market is notoriously difficult to predict, there's some early evidence to support Amodei's alarming forecast. A recent report from VC firm SignalFire, for example, found that the number of recent college graduates hired at tech companies has been dropping since the COVID pandemic, a phenomenon that could be fueled, in part, by those businesses' adoption of AI to handle routine tasks.

Amodei has also said that as soon as next year, AI could make it possible for a single-person company to reach a billion-dollar valuation.

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