An 11.5 billion dollar quarter, and a toggle buried in Twitch settings: the two halves of the AI economy

Two stories broke within days of each other, and they only make sense together. The first is about revenue: Anthropic posted preliminary revenue of more than 11.5 billion dollars for the second quarter, up from 787 million dollars in the same period a year earlier and 4.73 billion dollars in the first quarter of 2026, according to documents viewed by Bloomberg News. The second is about supply: Twitch added a setting letting creators opt out of having their streams, videos and posts used to train the artificial intelligence models of its parent company, Amazon.

The revenue line, and what it is paying for

A more than fourteenfold jump in a year is the kind of figure that changes a company's options rather than merely its balance sheet. Anthropic also posted positive adjusted operating income for the quarter, according to the same documents; the numbers are preliminary and could still change. The company said in May that its run-rate revenue had crossed 47 billion dollars, against roughly 10 billion dollars in total revenue for 2025.

The context is a possible initial public offering as soon as this autumn, which would make Anthropic one of the first major private AI companies to reach the public markets. Early meetings with prospective investors have been high-level and have not covered specific financials or a valuation, sources told CNBC; chief financial officer Krishna Rao is leading them. An Anthropic spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The purpose of that capital is not mysterious: compute costs, advanced hardware and purpose-built data centres are the recurring bill of this industry, and they escalate faster than product revenue for almost everyone.

The other input nobody prices

Which is what makes the Twitch change worth reading closely. The opt-out itself is trivial to use: account avatar, Settings, Security and Privacy, then a Generative AI Training toggle. What it revealed is that the practice existed before the switch did, and it remains unclear exactly when Twitch began using creators' content to train Amazon's systems. Twitch's terms of service, in effect since March 2024, already granted the company broad rights over user content.

More than 16,000 creators registered opposition in a dedicated forum to having their work used by default — a practice most of them learned about only because the setting appeared. The company's own explanation was unusually direct. Mike Minton, Twitch's head of product, said keeping the option enabled by default was necessary because otherwise nobody would participate.

I don't know for sure, but I think it's quite reasonable to assume that almost any publicly available content is used to train models in one way or another, with or without permission.

The toggle also has a stated limit: disabling it does not stop Twitch and Amazon from using channel content for the other purposes described in the privacy notice, which include AI-powered features for sponsorship matching, recommendations and moderation tools such as AutoMod. Opting out of training is not opting out of AI.

• Anthropic Q2 revenue: more than 11.5 billion dollars, against 787 million a year earlier (documents seen by Bloomberg).
• Q1 2026 revenue: 4.73 billion dollars; run-rate revenue crossed 47 billion in May.
• Twitch: Generative AI Training toggle, enabled by default, found under Settings, Security and Privacy.
• More than 16,000 creators objected in a Twitch forum after the setting appeared.

Why the two halves belong in one story

An AI company's income statement and its data pipeline are not separate concerns; they are the two ends of the same machine. Revenue at this scale is what funds the compute; content at this scale is what the compute consumes. The industry has priced the first with precision and the second at roughly zero, on the working assumption that publicly available means available. That assumption is now being tested in three places at once — in default settings that only become visible when a company adds a switch, in courtrooms weighing what counts as transformative use, and in the terms of service that most users accepted years before any of this was in question.

For American businesses the practical reading is narrow and useful. If your company publishes on a platform, the training question is a contract question, and it is answered in that platform's terms rather than in its announcements. Check whether a default exists, whether it can be changed, and what the change actually covers — because as Twitch has just demonstrated, an opt-out can be real, simple, and still much narrower than it first appears.