Nearly half of Anthropic's sales flow through Amazon and Google — its investors, suppliers, and rivals

#What happened

Anthropic's confidential IPO prospectus — a copy of which was seen by Reuters and reported by CTech on September 30, 2026 — reveals how much of the AI company's business runs through its biggest rivals. In 2025, 47% of Anthropic's sales to customers were routed through cloud partners Amazon and Alphabet's Google, totaling about $2.16 billion. That share has climbed fast: from 11% in 2023 to 32% in 2024 to nearly half in 2025.

The filing also shows revenue surged 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, while operating losses more than doubled to over $8 billion. The United States accounted for nearly two-thirds of sales. About $3.8 billion came from usage-based Claude payments, with $789 million from subscriptions. The company paid roughly $351 million in distribution fees to the cloud platforms — about 16 cents for every dollar of those marketplace sales.

The partners are more than a sales channel. Amazon and Google have invested tens of billions of dollars in Anthropic, supply critical computing power, and compete with it directly in AI. Cloud providers also collected 60% of Anthropic's $909 million in outstanding customer bills at the end of 2025, up from 42% in 2024 — meaning disputes or delays in that payment pipeline could hit cash flow. Two unnamed customers each accounted for 12% of revenue last year, and many large customers are not bound by long-term contracts. Anthropic acknowledged in the filing that relying on a small number of partners and suppliers "creates complex dynamics that could give rise to conflicts of interest and adversely affect our access to compute." The company also signed a cloud computing deal with Microsoft in November.

#Why it matters

The disclosure exposes the circular economics of the AI boom: Anthropic records the full value of marketplace contracts as revenue (it sets prices and delivers the service), while OpenAI has told investors this accounting inflates the reported figure by billions — a dispute Anthropic says follows established practice. With a ~$2 trillion IPO valuation sought and non-cancellable hosting commitments reaching $54.6 billion at the end of 2025 (total long-term commitments over $417 billion by early 2026), Anthropic's growth is inseparable from the giants funding it, supplying it, selling it, and competing with it.

#Sources

Sources: CTech / Reuters — https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/r8sh14ux4 (Report)