Anthropic Projects Soaring Growth to $34.5 Billion in 2027 Revenue
The Takeaway
• Anthropic management expects API revenue to be three times higher than OpenAI’s in 2027
• Anthropic burned $5.6 billion in cash last year
• Anthropic’s leaders anticipate company will stop burning cash in 2027
After burning $5.6 billion in cash last year, Anthropic said it would reduce that amount by nearly half in 2025 and projected up to $3.7 billion in revenue for the year as it gains on OpenAI, according to two people who have viewed the company’s figures.
Anthropic is also projecting that its revenue could grow to as high as $34.5 billion in 2027.
That kind of growth would require making up a lot of the ground that separates Anthropic from OpenAI, the market leader. OpenAI likely generates more than five times as much revenue as Anthropic right now and has forecast $44 billion in revenue in 2027. Anthropic and OpenAI have been barometers for corporate spending on generative AI, so tech investors are closely watching their performance.
In the likeliest outcome, known as a base case, Anthropic said revenue would reach $12 billion in 2027, up from $2.2 billion in 2025. It’s not publicly known how much revenue Anthropic generated in 2024, although its monthly revenue rose to about $80 million by the end of the year, compared to around $8 million at the start. That suggests full-year revenue in the $400 million to $600 million range.
Leaders of both companies have raised expectations about the impact their software will have on the world. In a statement yesterday following the AI Action Summit in Paris, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said AI could accelerate economic growth worldwide but could also cause significant disruptions in the labor force.
“A ‘country of geniuses in a data center’ could represent the largest change to the global labor market in human history,” Amodei said. (Amodei and his sister, Daniel Amodei, were key leaders at OpenAI before they left to start Anthropic in 2021.)
Anthropic’s next flagship Claude model could support its ambitious growth goals. The company is preparing to release the newest version in coming weeks, according to a person who has used it. Claude last year shocked researchers at OpenAI because it was better at certain coding tasks than OpenAI’s models.
However, recent releases of ubercheap models like High-Flyer Capital Management’s DeepSeek have raised questions about whether AI developers will need to cut prices to stay competitive. Anthropic has been one of the few AI labs that hasn’t slashed its model prices in the wake of DeepSeek.
Anthropic’s pitch suggests that it sees selling technology to businesses through an application programming interface as a bigger opportunity than competing with chatbot apps such as ChatGPT. OpenAI’s chatbot has been a breakout success with consumers as well as professionals such as programmers, marketers and lawyers, and it was generating more than $333 million per month in revenue from subscriptions as of the end of last year.
Overtaking OpenAI?
In fundraising materials Anthropic sent to investors, it said its leaders expected API revenue to hit $20 billion by 2027, which would be three times higher than the API revenue OpenAI has forecasted for that year. But even in the base case projection, Anthropic’s API revenue would beat OpenAI’s. (The rest of Anthropic’s projected revenue comes from its sales of the Claude chatbot to businesses and professionals.)
Anthropic says its technology could transform office roles such as generating or reviewing legal paperwork and automating software engineering. It cited code repository GitLab and legal search firm LexisNexis as examples of customers. Up-and-coming startups such as Anysphere, which develops the Cursor coding assistant for programmers, are also major buyers of Claude software.
The pitch comes as Anthropic seeks to raise $2 billion from investors at a pre-investment valuation of $58 billion, while OpenAI tries to raise financing at a pre-investment valuation of $260 billion.
Besides the revenue gap, another factor in the companies’ diverging valuations is Anthropic’s agreements with cloud providers that resell its AI—namely, Amazon. While OpenAI gives Microsoft 20% of its revenue through their business partnership, Anthropic previously told some investors it paid a substantially higher percentage to Amazon when companies purchase Anthropic models through Amazon.
Of the $34.5 billion in revenue Anthropic’s management projected for 2027, nearly two-thirds would come from its API business, and a majority of those sales would come from partners like Amazon, which has committed billions of dollars to the company and is developing a data center server cluster for it.
Burning Dollars
Another factor in the valuation gap: OpenAI is likely operating more efficiently than Anthropic.
Anthropic told investors it expects to burn $3 billion this year, substantially less than last year, when it burned $5.6 billion. Last year’s cash burn was nearly $3 billion more than Anthropic had previously projected. That’s likely due to the fact that more than half of the cash burn came from a one-off payment to access the data centers that power its technology, according to one of the people who viewed the pitch.
Anthropic’s management expects the company to stop burning cash in 2027.
OpenAI, in comparison, burned just $340 million in the first half of 2024 while generating many times more revenue than Anthropic did over the same time period, according to The Information’s analysis. OpenAI projections implied cash burn could rise in the coming years.
The costs to develop AI models accounted for a major portion of Anthropic’s expenses last year. The company spent $1.5 billion on servers for training AI models. OpenAI was on track to spend as much as $3 billion on training costs last year, though that figure includes additional expenses like paying for data.
Anthropic’s costs for research and development staff reached $160 million, though that likely excludes stock-based compensation—a substantial noncash expense. OpenAI reported $1.5 billion in stock compensation in the first half of 2024.
Anthropic ended 2024 with 915 employees, 521 of whom were in research and development. The company projects that total head count will more than double to 1,900 by the end of 2025. OpenAI, in comparison, had more than 1,600 employees as of September 2024.