Last fall, Anthropic was playing second fiddle to OpenAI. It had a lower valuation, while OpenAI continued to attract much of the attention as the first to drive the rise of generative AI. But the dynamic changed in late November, when Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5, which gave the company’s encryption agent Claude Code a new brain and helped elevate it to “AI killer app” status. That was arguably the moment that set Anthropic on its path to an upcoming initial public offering (IPO).
Developers had been using Claude Code to create software for much of 2025, but the tool had shown more promise than truly revolutionary results. Opus 4.5 gave Claude Code the intelligence to create an end-to-end application or feature, based solely on plain language planning and user guidance prompts.
Opus 4.5 enabled longer-lasting agents and better planning and execution workflows. Claude Code became better at discussing a project with a user-engineer, presenting a plan, incorporating feedback, and then carrying out a focused set of multi-step tasks to complete a software build. Anthropic sweetened the deal by imposing fewer usage limits, which makes a big difference for software engineers who spend their days deploying multiple agents to build different parts of a project.
Just as importantly, Anthropic changed the way software engineers access Claude Code. Instead of using the tool through their machine’s command-line interface, they can now select the Code tab in the Claude desktop app, which includes its own built-in terminal. Under that tab, the company also gathered many of the resources that developers typically use, including a file editor for viewing and editing code, code change review windows, parallel coding sessions for different tasks, and other tools. Anthropic turned Claude Code from a terminal/chat tool into something closer to a full desktop coding environment.
“Claude Code is great at fixing all those little bugs in old projects…” tweeted Pieter Levels, an influential Dutch entrepreneur and self-taught developer. “[B]Before I wouldn’t have time to fix these types of projects. . . But now it takes me an hour to do this and it works again!”
Claude’s beachhead
The new unified interface in Claude’s desktop application invited software engineers to do their non-software development work in the same place. With easy access to Claude chat and CoWork, engineers could use Claude for more general tasks, such as conducting research, accessing company data, composing emails, and designing presentations.
The interface also suits workers who code only occasionally, perhaps to create an app prototype to present to colleagues, but who benefit from doing much of their daily work with the help of Claude’s chat and CoWork’s data connections, skills and workflows.
Acceleration
Whatever the motivation, companies are choosing Anthropic, and the company’s accelerated entrepreneurial drive dates back to Claude Opus 4.5. At the end of 2025, Anthropic reported just $9 billion in annualized revenue run rate. (ARR extrapolates revenue from a recent month to a full year.) That number grew rapidly in 2026 as Claude Code proliferated. The company reported $14 billion in ARR in February and $30 billion in April. a may Reuters The report pegged the company’s ARR at $47 billion. For context, OpenAI said in late March that it was generating around $2 billion a month in revenue, equivalent to an ARR of $24 billion.
Anthropic reportedly said that more than 1,000 companies are now paying more than $1 million a year for Claude, and that this figure has more than doubled since February 2026. The company has announced major implementations with PwC, Allianz, Snowflake, Accenture, Deloitte and IBM. Anthropic expects to make an operating profit of $559 million during the quarter ending in June, on revenue of $10.9 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
While Anthropic doesn’t release raw Claude Code user numbers, survey data suggests the tool has plenty of room to grow. A JetBrains survey of 10,000 software developers worldwide in early April found that 29% used GitHub Copilot, while only 18% used Claude Code, tied with Cursor.
The internship is set up.
On Monday, Anthropic filed a confidential draft registration statement, or S-1, with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Under US rules, the SEC can privately review companies seeking IPOs, allowing a company to delay releasing detailed financials until later, closer to the actual listing.
Anthropic’s could end up being the second of three major AI-related IPOs in 2026. SpaceX has already filed and OpenAI is expected to do so later this year. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have potential to go public at valuations in excess of trillions of dollars, making them among the largest tech IPOs in history. Last week, Anthropic raised $65 billion in new financing at a valuation of $965 billion, including new money.
Experts aren’t worried about whether enterprise software engineering groups will adopt Claude Code. They believe the demand is real and growing. The most serious threat, both to Anthropic and its customers, is the cost of using the tool. Part of the appeal of Claude Code is that it develops a deep understanding of code bases and complex coding problems. That requires the agent to reason across large windows of context, which means using many tokens, the chunks of text, data and code it processes.
Corporate users, including Uber, are already racking up large bills as engineers deplete their tokens. Meanwhile, Anthropic is trying to find additional computing resources to process all the tokens generated by Claude Code users. The company is even paying Elon Musk $1.25 billion a month for use of the xAI/SpaceX Colossus 1 data center in Memphis.
When Anthropic’s prospectus appears, probably sometime this summer, we will finally learn more about the actual profitability of selling Claude Code.