Wedbush: Anthropic's revenue growth is slowing down, which doesn't mean AI spending is slowing

The Zhitong Finance App learned that although Anthropic's third-quarter revenue may disappoint some investors, Wedbush Securities believes this is not a sign of a slowdown in AI spending.

Wedbush analyst Matt Bryson wrote in the client report: “Considering the slowdown in month-on-month growth, there are even suggestions that Anthropic has reached an annualized revenue operating rate of $65 billion at the end of July, this result may indeed be worrying. But we want to point out two things: first, using extremely short data to estimate annual revenue can be misleading, especially when this data comes from second-hand or even third-hand information; second, Anthropic faced more competition for alternatives in the last quarter, whether Muse or CoPilot, and even so, the company achieved 45% month-on-month growth.”

Bryson added, “Overall, we haven't seen any signs of overall hardware demand slowing down. Although concerns such as rising financing interest rates and slowing growth of the underlying model are weighing on market sentiment, these factors do not seem to affect AI demand or supply chain dynamics. GPU rental prices are still rising, even for old systems.”

According to media reports, Anthropic is preparing for its much-anticipated November IPO. The company has revealed to investors that its third-quarter revenue was 16.8 billion US dollars, up 45% from the second quarter's 11.6 billion US dollars; while second-quarter revenue increased 147% from the first quarter's 4.7 billion US dollars, indicating a slowdown in revenue growth over the previous quarter. According to reports, due to the slowdown in revenue growth, some current and potential investors are considering participating in its IPO at a valuation of about 1.5 trillion US dollars, which is lower than the previous market forecast of about 2 trillion US dollars.

The company, led by CEO Dario Amodei, also said that its cash flow was positive, generating $1.70 in revenue for every dollar spent on computing power in the third quarter. According to reports, investors expect Anthropic's annualized revenue to reach 110 billion US dollars by the end of the year.

Anthropic added that after some adjustments, the company was profitable, with an adjusted gross margin of 85%. The AI giant that developed the Claude chatbot may be seeking more than $100 billion in funding in a public listing.