Anthropic vs Cursor: Revenue, Profit and Business Model
Anthropic reported $65B of revenue in FY2026 and — of net income. Cursor reported $4B of revenue in FY2026 and — of net income.
Latest financial snapshot
Financial summary
Anthropic
Anthropic's draft IPO prospectus, described by Reuters on September 28, 2026, shows 2025 revenue of $4.59 billion against $386 million in 2024, an operating loss of $8.06 billion (from $2.98 billion) and a GAAP net loss of $41.97 billion (from $8.31 billion). About $34 billion of that loss was a non-cash charge tied to convertible financing from Google and Amazon rather than cash burn. Operating expenses reached $12.65 billion, including $7.33 billion of compute and infrastructure, and the company ended 2025 with $20.28 billion of cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments. Growth since then has outpaced the annual accounts: run-rate revenue was $14 billion in February 2026, crossed $47 billion in May, reached about $65 billion in July, and second-quarter revenue of $11.5 billion came with the first positive adjusted operating income. Funding followed the same curve, from a $13 billion Series F at a $183 billion valuation in September 2025 to a $30 billion Series G at $380 billion in February 2026 and a $65 billion Series H at $965 billion in May 2026.
Cursor
Cursor never published audited financials as a private company, so its numbers come from company statements and reporting. Annualized revenue reached about $100 million in January 2025, $500 million by June 2025, more than $1 billion by November 2025, $2 billion in February 2026, $3 billion in late April 2026 and more than $4 billion in early June 2026 (Forbes). The company said enterprise revenue tripled in Q1 2026 versus Q4 2025. Funding rounds included an $8 million seed (2023), a $60 million Series A at $400 million (2024), a $900 million Series C at $9.9 billion (June 2025) and a $2.3 billion Series D at $29.3 billion (November 2025). SpaceX's $60 billion all-stock price converted Anysphere shares into 389,289,254 SpaceX Class A shares. Profitability has not been disclosed.
Revenue and profit by year
Anthropic
| Year | Revenue | Net income | Margin | Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2026 | $65B | — | 0.0% | +1316.1% | Source |
| FY2025 | $4.6B | -$42B | -914.4% | +1089.1% | Source |
| FY2024 | $386M | -$8.3B | -2152.8% | — | Source |
Cursor
| Year | Revenue | Net income | Margin | Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2026 | $4B | — | 0.0% | +300.0% | Source |
| FY2025 | $1B | — | 0.0% | — | Source |
Where the revenue comes from
Anthropic
- Developer and enterprise API consumption
Token-billed access to the Claude models through the Claude Developer Platform, with prompt caching priced at $0.20 per million tokens on Claude Opus 5.5 to make long agent loops affordable. Anthropic does not publish a segment split; the two largest customers each accounted for about 12 percent of 2025 revenue.
- Agent products
Claude Code and Cowork are sold to individuals, teams and enterprises. Claude Code passed $1 billion of run-rate revenue in December 2025 and $2.5 billion by February 2026, when enterprises accounted for more than half of its revenue.
- Seat subscriptions
Claude Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans for individuals and organizations, including HIPAA-eligible enterprise deployments since January 2026.
- Cloud marketplace resale
Claude is sold through Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI and Microsoft Azure Foundry, which lets customers spend committed cloud budget on Claude.
Cursor
- Business and enterprise subscriptions
~75% (mid-2026, company-stated)
Per-seat Teams and Enterprise contracts plus usage above included allowances.
- Individual subscriptions and usage~25%
Pro and higher individual tiers, plus pay-as-you-go model usage beyond plan limits.
Business model and strategy
Anthropic
How it makes money
Anthropic charges for Claude in four ways. Developers and enterprises pay per million tokens on the Claude API, where cache reads cost far less than fresh input ($0.20 per million against $4 on Claude Opus 5.5). Individuals and teams pay subscriptions across Claude Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans.
Growth strategy
Growth runs through three channels. First, agent products: Claude Code went from internal experiment to general availability in May 2025 and over $2.5 billion of run-rate revenue by February 2026, and Cowork extended the same engine to non-technical work in January 2026. Second, cloud co-selling, with Claude the only frontier model on Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI and Microsoft Azure Foundry.
Competitive advantage
Anthropic leads on agentic coding and long-horizon tasks. Claude Opus 5.5, released September 22, 2026, tops Anthropic's published benchmark table on SWE-bench Pro (89.9 percent) and Terminal-Bench 4.0 (66.4 percent) while costing $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, roughly 40 percent less to run than Opus 5.
Cursor
How it makes money
Cursor makes money from subscriptions. A free Hobby tier lets developers try the editor and agent with limited usage. Paid individual plans (Pro at $20 a month, with higher-usage tiers above it) include a monthly allowance of frontier-model usage, and heavy users pay for extra usage at model API rates.
Growth strategy
Cursor grew bottom-up: developers adopted it on their own, then companies bought team licenses. It now focuses on enterprise sales, with business customers making up about three-quarters of revenue by mid-2026. Product expansion moved from the editor into background and cloud agents, a command-line agent, web and mobile access, Bugbot code review and the Graphite code-review platform it acquired in December 2025.
Competitive advantage
Cursor owns the whole editor rather than running as a plugin, so it can design agent workflows, inline diffs, Tab predictions and codebase indexing into the product directly. It has trained its own models (Cursor Tab and the Composer family) for the high-frequency parts of coding, which lowers cost and latency.
Questions about Anthropic vs Cursor
Which company has higher revenue — Anthropic PBC or Anysphere Inc. (Cursor)?
Anthropic PBC reported $65.0B (FY2026), while Anysphere Inc. (Cursor) reported $4.0B (FY2026). By last reported revenue, Anthropic PBC is the larger business, with Anysphere Inc. (Cursor) reporting a smaller revenue base.
Which is more financially efficient — Anthropic PBC or Anysphere Inc. (Cursor)?
Anthropic PBC generates $26.00M / employee in revenue per employee, while Anysphere Inc. (Cursor) generates $13.33M / employee. Anthropic PBC shows higher revenue efficiency per headcount, though this reflects business model differences — capital-light software companies routinely outperform labour-intensive manufacturers on this metric.
How do Anthropic PBC and Anysphere Inc. (Cursor) make money?
Anthropic PBC and Anysphere Inc. (Cursor) generate revenue in fundamentally different ways. Anthropic PBC: Anthropic charges for Claude in four ways. Anysphere Inc. (Cursor): Cursor makes money from subscriptions.
Is Anthropic PBC bigger than Anysphere Inc. (Cursor)?
By last reported revenue, Anthropic PBC ($65.0B (FY2026)) is the larger company compared to Anysphere Inc. (Cursor) ($4.0B (FY2026)). Revenue scale is one dimension of size — market capitalisation, employee count, and geographic reach are also relevant depending on the context.
Figures come from each company's filings and the sources linked beside them. Amounts reported in another currency are shown in US dollars at an approximate rate and marked with ~. Back to the Anthropic vs Cursor overview