Anthropic's monthly revenue growth slowed in Q3, a Substack analysis finds: Reveneau

Why it mattersA team pricing an AI feature on last quarter's growth should look again. The year's biggest number may hide a flat summer.

Anthropic's yearly revenue is still climbing. The monthly line behind the yearly figure is not. That is the finding of a Substack post by Henry Blodget. Blodget is a former equity analyst. He now writes a newsletter called Regenerator. The post was published on 15 October. It reached 227 points on Hacker News on 3 November, which is what brought it back into view.

The underlying numbers are not new. Anthropic shared high-level Q3 financials with investors in October. The New York Times reported those first, in a piece by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Lauren Hirsch and Sri Muppidi. Anthropic's amended S-1, filed on 2 November, named a Q3 figure near those marks. What Blodget's post does is work out the month-over-month picture the quarterly numbers hide.

The quarterly numbers, as Anthropic reported them

The three quarters Blodget cites, each with the sequential change, are these. Q1 revenue was $4.8 billion. Q2 was $11.6 billion, up $6.8 billion and 141 percent on the quarter before. Q3 was $16.8 billion, up $5.2 billion and 45 percent on Q2. Blodget calls these "jaw-dropping" numbers and then says that is where most readers stop.

The monthly estimate that changes the picture

Blodget adds one more fact Anthropic had already made public. The company had a $65 billion annualized revenue rate in July. That rate implies about $5.4 billion in July revenue alone. The whole of Q3 was $16.8 billion. July alone was $5.4 billion. The two remaining months averaged no more than $5.7 billion each. Blodget's chart shows that line going almost flat from July to September.

The quarterly figures already imply a slowdown. Average monthly revenue added in Q2 was about $760 million. In Q3 the same measure fell to about $580 million. Blodget's July data point suggests the real slowdown inside Q3 was sharper than that.

Blodget suggests reasons without picking one. Anthropic's Opus 5.5 costs less per million tokens than Opus 4. A developer using Opus 5.5 pays less for the same work. Rivals such as DeepSeek offer cheaper coding at the level the market will accept.

What the author does not claim

Blodget is careful about the limits of his method. The monthly numbers are his back-of-the-envelope estimates, not Anthropic's figures. The July $65 billion run-rate came from Anthropic itself, but the company has not published its own monthly line. The analysis is one quarter, not a trend. Any one of the three months inside Q3 could have had a different reason to be slower.

A reader planning an AI product has to decide which figure to plan on. The year's biggest number says the market is still doubling. Blodget's monthly line says the summer was close to flat. Both are true at once, and most readers only quote the first. The post gathered 227 Hacker News points this week. That is what people in the industry are now talking about.

Source

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