Anthropic (ANTHRO) raised its growth forecasts by about 13% to 28% over the next three years and expects to generate up to $70B in revenue in 2028, up from around $5B this year, The Information reported, citing a person familiar with the company’s financials.
The company, which is backed by Amazon (AMZN) and Alphabet’s (GOOG) (GOOG) Google, expects demand from businesses for its AI models to drive the growth. Anthropic forecast that its 2025 revenue from selling access to these models through an application programming interface, or API, will be about double the revenue its rival OpenAI (OPENAI) generates from API sales, the report added.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.
The company expects demand from businesses for its AI models to drive that growth. Anthropic projected that its 2025 revenue from selling access to these models through an application programming interface will be roughly double the revenue its bigger rival OpenAI generates from API sales.
The acceleration of Anthropic’s business may encourage investors to invest money in the company in the next few months. If it raises another funding round, it would likely target a valuation in the range of $300B to $400B, the report noted.
In September Anthropic raised $13B from investors. This was higher than the nearly $3.5B it had initially planned, the report noted.
The funding valued the maker of the Claude AI chatbot at $183B.
Among its most optimistic forecasts, the company expects to become cash flow positive as soon as 2027. That’s a shorter timeline than that of its older and much larger rival, OpenAI, which does not expect to generate cash until 2030.
OpenAI, recently valued at $500B in an employee share sale, has forecast it will generate $13B in revenue this year — nearly triple Anthropic’s most optimistic forecast of $4.7B. But OpenAI will burn more than triple as much cash as Anthropic this year due to its massive computing costs for developing new AI, or research and development compute, the report noted.
In 2027, OpenAI’s cash burn will amount to around $35B compared to free cash flow of $3B for Anthropic that year, as per forecasts from both companies, the report noted.
In 2028, Anthropic expects it could generate as much as $17B in cash, compared to the nearly $47B of cash burn OpenAI has forecast. (In a more achievable scenario, Anthropic forecast about $3.6B in free cash flow in 2028 on $32.5B in revenue), according to the report.
While OpenAI forecasts that revenue from ChatGPT subscriptions will power much of its growth in the coming years, Anthropic leaders think the API will continue to drive company’s revenue. Its projected API and related revenue of around $3.8B this year compared to the $1.8B OpenAI earlier projected for API sales this year, the report added.
Microsoft (MSFT) also generates revenue from selling OpenAI models via an API to its Azure cloud customers, and it shares a small percentage of that revenue with OpenAI.
Claude Code is close to generating annualized revenue of $1B, up from about $400M in July. Anthropic’s annualized revenue, or the last month’s revenue multiplied by 12, was nearing in $7B last month.
Anthropic raised its most optimistic revenue projections for the year by about 26% to $4.7B from a forecast it gave investors ahead of its March round. The company raised its 2026 forecast 28% to $15.2B and its 2027 forecast 13% to $38.9B. Anthropic ended last year at about $381M in revenue, the report noted.
The updated revenue forecasts are good news for Google and Amazon, which rent out specialized servers to Anthropic. The company expects its gross profit margin, which measures how much revenue it makes compared to the cost of producing that revenue — largely from running servers— to swing from negative 94% last year to as much as 50% this year and 77% in 2028, as per report.
Anthropic expects its gross profit margin — largely from running servers — to swing from negative 94% last year to as much as 50% this year and 77% in 2028.
However, Anthropic’s calculation only accounts for the costs of running its AI models for its paying users. If it were to include the cost of running its models for nonpaying users, as OpenAI does, Anthropic’s gross margins would be lower — negative 109% last year, 47% this year, and 75% in 2028 in its most optimistic projections. The most efficient enterprise software startups usually have gross margins of 70% or higher, the report added.