#OpenAIQ2LossWidens

JUST IN: Odds of Anthropic IPOing above SpaceX's $SPCX $1.77 trillion valuation surge.

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told employees in an all-hands yesterday that OpenAI will be a public company in 2027, but could go public sooner if 'our business continues to inflect.' She also said it's possible Anthropic goes public next month.

The contrast is sharper than the headline: OpenAI’s reported Q2 revenue rose about 18% to $6.7B, yet its operating loss widened to roughly $12.3B. Over the same period, Anthropic reportedly reached around $11.6B in revenue, more than doubling from Q1, with a small adjusted operating profit. My read is that a potential OpenAI listing in 2027 would be judged less on growth alone and more on whether compute-heavy expansion can produce credible operating leverage. For now, the comparison is informative but incomplete, since neither company’s figures come from audited public filings. #OpenAIQ2LossWidens

Q2 was the disaster quarter for labs? Anthropic missed ARR consensus massively OpenAI QoQ growth at +18% WTF?

OpenAI's revenue grew much slower than Anthropic's last quarter.

OpenAI’s Growth Slows as Anthropic Races Ahead OpenAI’s second-quarter revenue grew 18% to $6.7 billion, up from $5.7 billion, but that pace was dramatically slower than rival Anthropic. Anthropic’s revenue more than doubled to $11.6 billion, allowing it to surpass OpenAI for the first time, according to The Wall Street Journal. The bigger concern for OpenAI is profitability: its operating loss widened from $9.3 billion to $12.3 billion, even as Anthropic moved into a small operating profit. Anthropic’s momentum has been fueled particularly by enterprise adoption and Claude Code, intensifying pressure on OpenAI as both companies prepare for potential IPOs.

BREAKING: OpenAI's revenue grew much slower than Anthropic's last quarter, per WSJ

Anthropic is asking the public for $2 trillion using a revenue number from…2028. That valuation would make it the largest stock market debut in history, ahead of SpaceX, which went public in June at $1.77 trillion. The company last raised privately in May at $965 billion. Investors now expect roughly DOUBLE that in October. And the unusual part is not the size here: Public companies are normally priced off the last 12 months of results, or at a stretch off next year's estimate. Reuters reported on Friday that bankers and investors are applying revenue multiples to Anthropic's forecast for 2028, which is more than two years past the deal. That forecast is $190 billion to $200 billion of annual revenue. It is more than four times the run rate the company disclosed in May. Before dismissing it, look at what the company has actually done, because the growth is not imaginary: Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate was around $9 billion at the end of 2025. By May it was $47 billion and it passed $65 billion at the end of July, a 7x increase inside a year. Second quarter revenue came in above $11.5 billion against roughly $787 million in the same quarter of 2025. The company projected its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million. Investors expect the run rate to reach $100 billion to $120 billion before the year closes. By comparison, OpenAI's run rate sat near $40 billion at the end of July, around 60% of Anthropic's. So the growth is real. But the question is whether anyone can price three more years of it. Because the things that could bend that curve are already visible today: Anthropic's top model costs more than two and a half times OpenAI's flagship. Chinese open-weight models deliver usable performance at a fraction of either price. And revenue growth slowed in June when the Commerce Department temporarily restricted exports of the company's best models, which is a reminder that a single government decision can reach directly into the forecast. Now look at what the multiple HAS to be… Palantir trades at 53 times expected 2026 revenue, which already makes it one of the most expensive stocks on the market. Cloudflare and SpaceX both sit near 41.6 times. Those are the reference points bankers are using. One investor told the Financial Times that a company growing at 800% a year should command at least 30 times revenue, which on their own math points to $3 trillion rather than two. And there is one more thing worth holding onto: Anthropic filed confidentially with the SEC in June and has been in a quiet period since. Every figure in this post reached the public through people speaking anonymously, and the company has declined to comment on all of it. So the largest listing ever attempted is being marketed to public investors through numbers none of them can independently check, against a forecast for a year that has not started yet. This is becoming the house style of the 2026 IPO market rather than a one-off. Cerebras priced its listing on ramping infrastructure demand. SpaceX built its debut around an addressable market model that reached years past its actual financials. Both asked buyers to fund a shape rather than a result. Anthropic is the biggest version of that trade anyone has attempted. The bull case is straightforward and it MIGHT be correct: A business compounding this fast, already turning an operating profit, selling into enterprises that are rebuilding their workflows around it, may look cheap at $2 trillion in three years. The bear case is equally simple: Every dollar of that valuation above the current run rate is a forecast, and whoever buys the stock in October is the one holding that forecast if the curve bends. Do you believe in Anthropic?