By Anna Tong, Jeffrey Dastin

SAN FRANCISCO, May 30 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence developer Anthropic is making about $3 billion in annualized revenue, according to two sources familiar with the matter, in an early validation of generative AI use in the business world.

The milestone, which projects the company's current sales over the course of a year, is a significant jump from December 2024 when the metric was nearly $1 billion, the sources said. The figure crossed $2 billion around the end of March, and at May's end it hit $3 billion, one of the sources said.

While consumers have embraced rival OpenAI's ChatGPT, a number of enterprises have limited their rollouts to experimentation, despite board-level interest in AI. Anthropic's revenue surge, largely from selling AI models as a service to other companies, is a data point showing how business demand is growing, one of the sources said.

A key driver is code generation. The San Francisco-based startup, backed by Google parent Alphabet GOOGL.O and Amazon.com AMZN.O, is famous for AI that excels at computer programming. Products in the so-called codegen space have experienced major growth and adoption in recent months, often drawing on Anthropic's models.

This demand is setting Anthropic apart among software-as-a-service vendors. Its single-quarter revenue increases would count Anthropic as the fastest-growing SaaS company that at least one venture capitalist has ever seen.

"We've looked at the IPOs of over 200 public software companies, and this growth rate has never happened," said Meritech General Partner Alex Clayton, who is not an Anthropic investor and has no inside knowledge of its sales.

He cautioned that these comparisons are not fully precise, since Anthropic also has consumer revenue via subscriptions to its Claude chatbot. Still, by contrast, publicly traded SaaS company Snowflake took six quarters to go from $1 billion to $2 billion in such run-rate revenue, Clayton said.

Anthropic competitor OpenAI has projected it will end 2025 with more than $12 billion in total revenue, up from $3.7 billion last year, three people familiar with the matter said. This total revenue is different from an estimated annualized figure like Anthropic's. Reuters could not determine this metric for OpenAI.

The two rivals appear to be establishing their own swim lanes. While both offer enterprise and consumer products, OpenAI is shaping up to be a consumer-oriented company, and the majority of its revenue comes from subscriptions to its ChatGPT chatbot, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told Bloomberg late last year.

OpenAI has not reported enterprise-specific revenue but said in May that paying seats for its ChatGPT enterprise product have grown to 3 million, from 2 million in February, and that T-Mobile TMUS.O and Morgan Stanley MS.N are among its enterprise customers.

In the consumer race, Anthropic's Claude has seen less adoption than OpenAI. Claude's traffic, a proxy for consumer interest, was about 2% of ChatGPT's in April, according to Web analytics firm Similarweb.

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by a team that departed OpenAI over differences in vision, closed a $3.5 billion fundraise earlier this year. That valued the company at $61.4 billion. OpenAI is currently valued at $300 billion.

(Reporting by Anna Tong and Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Kenrick Cai in San Francisco and Krystal Hu in New York; Editing by Kenneth Li and Matthew Lewis)

((anna.tong@thomsonreuters.com; Mob: +1-650-468-3913))