New Delhi, Aug. 18 -- Last year, most companies experimenting with artificial intelligence described it as promising. This year, they are writing large checks for it on multiyear contracts. The financial consequence of that shift has arrived in one figure: Anthropic, the maker of Claude, reached an annualized revenue run rate of $65 billion at the end of July, up sevenfold in seven months, placing it decisively ahead of its rival OpenAI and positioning it for what would be the largest technology initial public offering in history.

the difference between testing AI on a workflow and building the entire workflow around AI.

The company's investors now project year-end revenues between $100 billion and $120 billion, according to reporting b...