Anthropic Projects $70 Billion in Revenue, $17 Billion in Cash Flow in 2028
The Takeaway
- Anthropic projects as much as $70 billion in revenue by 2028
- Company expects to be cash flow positive by 2027, generating $17 billion in 2028
- Potential funding round could target a $300 billion to $400 billion valuation.
Anthropic this summer hiked its most optimistic growth forecasts by roughly 13% to 28% over the next three years and projected generating as much as $70 billion in revenue in 2028, up from close to $5 billion this year, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s financials.
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 could encourage investors to pour money into the company in the next few months. If it raises another funding round, it would likely target a valuation between $300 billion and $400 billion, according to a person with knowledge of its plans.
Anthropic raised $13 billion from investors in September, higher than the roughly $3.5 billion it had initially planned, according to the person with knowledge of the company’s financials. The funding valued Anthropic at $170 billion before the new capital. That was nearly three times its valuation in a financing announced in March.
Among its most optimistic projections, the four-year-old maker of the Claude chatbot 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 doesn’t expect to generate cash until 2030.
The Anthropic forecasts, which haven’t previously been reported, detail how the company is positioning itself as a more efficient competitor to OpenAI, which has rapidly eclipsed its rivals in both fundraising and massive deals for server chips to run and train its models. They also show how Anthropic has emerged as the market leader selling AI models to businesses and app developers.
OpenAI, recently valued at $500 billion in an employee share sale, has projected it will generate $13 billion in revenue this year—nearly triple Anthropic’s most optimistic forecast of $4.7 billion. 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.
In 2027, OpenAI’s cash burn will amount to about $35 billion versus free cash flow of $3 billion for Anthropic that year, according to forecasts from both companies.
In 2028, Anthropic projects it could generate as much as $17 billion in cash, compared to the nearly $47 billion of cash burn OpenAI has projected. (In a more achievable scenario, Anthropic projects about $3.6 billion in free cash flow in 2028 on $32.5 billion in revenue.)
Anthropic, started by ex-OpenAI senior executives, has focused on selling its Claude AI models through an API to business customers, such as Anysphere, maker of Cursor, and Harvey, a legal AI startup. It also sells subscriptions priced between $17 to $150 per month for its premium features, including its coding copilot Claude Code.
That’s a narrower scope than that of OpenAI, whose ambitions range from advertising to e-commerce to hardware AI devices.
While OpenAI has projected that revenue from ChatGPT subscriptions will power much of its growth in the coming years, Anthropic leaders believe the API will continue to be the company’s revenue workhorse. Its projected API and related revenue of around $3.8 billion this year compares to the $1.8 billion OpenAI earlier projected for API sales this year.
Microsoft also generates revenue from selling OpenAI models through an API to its Azure cloud customers, and it shares a small percentage of that revenue with OpenAI.
The company forecasts that sales to businesses through its API and related apps will continue to generate more than 80% of its revenue through 2028. Business customers, which Anthropic primarily focuses on, tend to be less likely to churn and more likely to renew or even expand their spending, investors in software startups say. But sales of its nine-month-old coding assistant, Claude Code, will propel sales to individual developers.
Claude Code is close to generating annualized revenue of $1 billion, up from roughly $400 million in July, according to one of the people. Anthropic’s annualized revenue, or the last month’s revenue multiplied by 12, was nearing $7 billion last month.
Anthropic raised its most optimistic revenue forecasts for the year by roughly 26% to $4.7 billion from a projection it gave investors ahead of its March round. It lifted its 2026 forecasts 28% to $15.2 billion and its 2027 forecasts 13% to $38.9 billion. Anthropic ended last year at roughly $381 million in revenue.
The updated revenue projections are great news for Google and Amazon, which rent out specialized servers to Anthropic.
Anthropic 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.
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 typically have gross margins of 70% or higher.
