FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: Anthropic logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo/File Photo

By Krystal Hu and Deepa Seetharaman

(Reuters) -Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is projecting to more than double and potentially nearly triple its annualized revenue run rate next year, fueled by the rapid adoption of its enterprise products, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The company is on track to meet an internal goal of $9 billion in annual revenue run rate - a calculation of annual revenue extrapolated from the current sales pace - by the end of 2025, the people said. For 2026, Anthropic has set even more aggressive targets: a base case of more than doubling to $20 billion in annualized revenue and a best case of as much as $26 billion, the people said, requesting anonymity to discuss private figures.

Anthropic told Reuters its annual revenue run rate is approaching $7 billion this month, but declined to comment on future projections. The company has said its annual revenue run rate was more than $5 billion in August.

Anthropic debuted a new version of its cheapest AI model, Haiku, on Wednesday, as part of a broader effort to appeal to companies that are looking for capable AI systems that are dramatically cheaper than its more advanced models. The Haiku 4.5 model sells for about one-third the price of Sonnet 4, one of its medium-sized models.

AI DEMAND SOARS

The revenue projections underscore continued strong demand for generative AI tools among businesses and help explain investor enthusiasm, even as AI spending, especially in infrastructure buildout, comes under scrutiny. Some people worry the level of investment might be unsustainable.

Fueling the expansion is the uptake of enterprise products, which are built for organizations. Anthropic has more than 300,000 business and enterprise customers, which account for about 80% of its revenue.

The company sells access to its models via application programming interfaces, which are tools that help different software communicate. It offers products including the code‑generation tool Claude Code, which has reached an annualized revenue run rate of nearly $1 billion since its launch earlier this year, one of the people added.

The revenue trajectory positions Anthropic as a rival to ChatGPT maker OpenAI. OpenAI said it crossed $13 billion in annualized revenue in August, and is on pace to achieve over $20 billion by end of the year, driven by the continued growth of ChatGPT, the generative AI assistant that has more than 800 million weekly active users.

Anthropic's revenue milestones follow a period of brisk fundraising and valuation gains for the San Francisco-based startup. The company was recently valued at $183 billion after raising $13 billion in a Series F round led by ICONIQ, more than doubling its $61.5 billion valuation in March.

Backed by technology companies including Alphabet's Google and Amazon.com, Anthropic develops the Claude family of large language models, which compete with OpenAI's GPT series. The company emphasizes AI safety and building models for enterprise use cases. Its models have helped power a boom in code‑generation startups such as Cursor.

Anthropic has been expanding sales to governments and growing outside the U.S. In August, it said it would offer its Claude model to the U.S. government for $1. The company plans to open its first office in Bengaluru, India, in 2026 — its second-largest market after the U.S.— and intends to triple its international workforce and expand its applied AI team fivefold this year to meet rising demand.

(Reporting by Krystal Hu and Deepa Seetharaman in San Francisco; editing by Kenneth Li and Rod Nickel)