🧠🤖 Anthropic Revenue Jumped How Much?!

Happy Sunday,

Markets are entering an environment where some long-standing investing assumptions are being put to the test. Active stock managers continue to struggle despite greater dispersion across markets, while rising inflation and rate expectations are challenging the traditional role of bonds as a portfolio safe haven. At the same time, the AI boom continues to produce extraordinary growth, with Anthropic emerging as one of its biggest beneficiaries.

In today’s Market Report, we look at why active managers still can’t consistently beat the market, what a global shift toward higher rates could mean for investors, and the remarkable growth behind Anthropic as it moves closer to a potential IPO.

- Humphrey & Rickie

• Only 27% of actively managed U.S. large-cap stock funds beat their passive benchmarks in the 12 months ended June 30, and that’s actually better than their long-term track record, where just 13% outperformed over the past decade.

• Active managers have been arguing that AI disruption and higher interest rates finally create the stock-picker’s environment they’ve been waiting for.

  • Stock-market dispersion, the divergence in returns between individual stocks, has soared to its highest level in decades, which should theoretically reward good stock selection. The S&P 500’s ten largest companies now represent more than 40% of its total value, the highest concentration since the 1960s, and nearly all of that weight sits in technology.

• Most active managers are simply unwilling to make bets that concentrated in a single sector, and if they underweight the mega-cap winners, they lag the index almost by definition. Passive ETFs are on pace to hit $1 trillion in net inflows for the first time this year, and passive funds now hold nearly twice the assets of active equity funds.

  

• On the flipside, active management actually does add value when it comes to bonds. Active intermediate core bond funds beat their benchmarks 66% of the time over the past year, and a majority have outperformed for three consecutive years. The fixed income market is less efficiently priced, more complex, and less dominated by a handful of mega-issuers.

• A significant shift is underway in global fixed income markets as two-thirds of the 32 international fixed income markets tracked by Bloomberg are now priced for rate hikes over the next year, with traders pricing in roughly 400 basis points of cumulative tightening across seven major markets.

  

• Iran-war-driven energy prices, heavy government defense and infrastructure spending, and an AI investment boom that is supercharging growth and demand for chips, power, and labor are all driving rate hike expectations.

  • South Korea leads the expected tightening at over 100 basis points, with Japan, Canada, the UK, and the eurozone all seeing meaningful rate hike expectations build.

• OECD inflation recently hit a two-year high and South Korean government bonds have already lost more than 9% this year in local currency terms, the worst performance among Bloomberg’s 44 globally-tracked bond markets.

  

• While the classic 60/40 portfolio assumes bonds rally when stocks fall, when central banks globally are tightening simultaneously in response to structural inflation pressures, bonds can decline alongside stocks.

• Anthropic reported preliminary Q2 2026 revenue of more than $11.5 billion, a massive 14x increase from $787 million in the same period a year ago and nearly two and a half times its Q1 2026 revenue of $4.73 billion.

• The company also reported positive adjusted operating income for the quarter, a meaningful milestone for a company that has been burning through capital at an enormous rate to develop frontier AI models.

• Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate crossed $47 billion in May, putting it ahead of rival OpenAI’s $40 billion-plus run rate on that metric. The growth is being driven by surging enterprise adoption of Claude across coding, professional services, and corporate workflows, as businesses increasingly embed AI into core operations.

  • The company is meeting with investors ahead of a potential IPO this fall, working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan as underwriters.

• The IPO, if it proceeds on the expected timeline, would be one of the largest in history. Anthropic was most recently valued at approximately $965 billion, and would arrive before both OpenAI’s planned listing and a potential DeepSeek IPO.

• Anthropic needs public market capital to sustain its model development pace as the AI arms race demands hundreds of billions in infrastructure investment. For investors, the key questions ahead of any IPO will be around profitability sustainability, the margins on that revenue, and how durable enterprise AI spending proves to be as the market matures and competition from OpenAI, Google, and Chinese models intensifies.