Anthropic let rivals pay to copy Claude, then locked them out before a $2 trillion IPO

The copy fee buried in the IPO meetings

The number nobody led with from Wednesday's pre-IPO meetings: Anthropic'sPVT$350B — Anthropic, private, latest valuation $350B rivals were paying it to be copied, in an offering bankers say could value the company above $2 trillion ³⁷. Distillation, running queries through Claude and training a rival model on the replies, accounted for 5 to 7 percent of revenue↗, and Anthropic told investors it materially curtailed the practice in the third quarter ¹³. On second-quarter revenue of $11.5 billion, that share is more than half a billion dollars of competitor money ²⁴.

Growth slowed the quarter the meter stopped

The disclosure landed in the quarter investors were reading for permission to pay $2 trillion ³⁷. Revenue reached $16.8 billion, up 45 percent sequentially↗, after roughly 140 percent growth in the second quarter ¹⁴⁵⁶. Goldman Sachs▲+1.39% — Goldman Sachs, up 1.39 percent today and Morgan Stanley▲+0.49% — Morgan Stanley, up 0.49 percent today lead an offering bankers have said could raise more than $100 billion ³⁷.

A safety policy that cuts the top line

The case against those paying customers came from Anthropic itself. Its September report, 154 pages titled Detecting and Countering Misuse of AI↗, says DeepSeek routed 12.1 million user inputs into Claude over 14 days in July and Moonshot more than 23 million between May and July; China's regulator is now probing both labs ⁸. Meta▼−0.26% — Meta, down 0.26 percent today and Microsoft▲+0.88% — Microsoft, up 0.88 percent today, two more large clients, now lean more on their own models ³. A buyer in the listing is underwriting a revenue line the company's own policy removes.

Margins flipped, the run rate did not

Elsewhere the meeting was friendlier. Anthropic banked $1.70 of revenue per dollar of compute, up from $0.63 in 2025, on 11 percent operating margins and positive cash flow ¹³. TMT Breakout's own estimate still puts September's annualized run rate, one month of revenue scaled to a year, near $70 billion, short of the high-70s investors expected, and pins $4 to 7 billion of the gap on the lockout plus Meta and Microsoft moving to their own models ¹. SemiAnalysis projects about $74 billion by year-end, against summer investor hopes above $100 billion ³. The $110 billion figure Reuters carried came from attendees, not company guidance ¹⁶. And a price war has arrived: Anthropic priced Claude Haiku 5.5 about 75 percent below its predecessor this month ³.

Menlo reads the same numbers the other way

Matt Murphy, a Menlo Ventures partner and early Anthropic investor, sees the same numbers the other way: since Claude 3.5 Opus, Anthropic has held more than 70 percent of tokens and revenue on OpenRouter↗, a marketplace for model access, and enterprise AI spending grew about fivefold this year ⁹. Usage reports do show tokens shifting to roughly 80 percent open-weight models, ones anyone can download and run, in twelve weeks; companies will still cap them at 20 to 30 percent of tokens, Murphy says, because frontier intelligence matters ⁹.

October decides the $100 billion question

The next reading is October's revenue, expected to re-accelerate on the newer Claude models Opus 5.5 and Sonnet ¹. The listing may slip until after the November midterm elections ⁶. New York City Comptroller Mark Levine, who oversees pension funds holding more than $325 billion, has asked Anthropic to pause the offering until it closes the safety gaps its own filing concedes↗ ⁷. That prospectus warns advanced AI could pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity ⁶. October's revenue will show whether the growth Anthropic switched off comes back. Until then, buyers are asked to pay above $2 trillion ³⁷ for a company that has shown it will cut a paying line of business as a safety measure.