Anthropic's roadshow disclosed a long-term operating profit margin target of 35% or above
On November 10, AI company Anthropic disclosed in its IPO roadshow video that the company believes it can achieve an adjusted operating profit margin of 35% or more in the long term, up from 15% in the third quarter of 2026, but did not provide a specific timeline for achieving this. Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao stated that the company plans to improve its long-term cost structure by enhancing computing efficiency, increasing the proportion of directly leased chips and data centers, and expanding the share of its inference business. The ratio of computing and infrastructure expenses to revenue aims to decrease from 58% in the third quarter to 45% to 50%; the proportion of sales, marketing, and partnership expenses is expected to drop from 14% to 7% to 10%, and adjusted personnel and other operating expenses are expected to decrease from 13% to 7% to 10%.As of the end of September, there were over 11,900 enterprise customers that contributed more than $100,000 in revenue to Anthropic over the past 12 months, including over 1,900 customers contributing more than $1 million and about 250 customers contributing over $10 million. The net revenue retention rate for enterprise customers is approximately 900%, with more than half of the enterprise customers using both the Claude Platform and at least one Anthropic proprietary application. The roadshow also showcased application cases from clients such as Eli Lilly, Rakuten, Salesforce, and Walmart. The company measures computing efficiency by the ratio of revenue to computing and infrastructure expenses, which increased from 0.40 times in the first quarter of 2025 to 1.72 times in the third quarter of 2026, approximately 4.3 times higher than before, but lower than the second quarter's 2.08 times. The company stated that it used about $5 billion in short-term computing in the third quarter, with costs significantly higher than those for computing procured under multi-year agreements.In terms of actual performance, Anthropic reported third-quarter revenue of $16.956 billion, adjusted operating profit of $2.463 billion, and an adjusted operating profit margin of 15%, down from 19% in the second quarter. Under GAAP standards, the company still recorded an operating loss of $567 million in the third quarter. The adjusted metrics exclude expenses such as equity incentives and non-cash charitable donations and cannot be equated to GAAP earnings. As of the end of October, the company's annualized revenue run rate was approximately $81 billion, not the actual revenue achieved for the full year. Additionally, Anthropic disclosed long-term commitments for computing and infrastructure of about $90 billion, of which approximately $45.16 billion is expected to occur by the end of 2030, with related commitments maturing in the next 12 months amounting to about $7.07 billion. As of the end of the third quarter, the company held approximately $96 billion in cash and cash equivalents and about $36 billion in short-term investments.
