Anthropic's IPO Filing Shows 47% of Its Revenue Flows Through Amazon and Google — Investors, Suppliers and Rivals at Once

Anthropic's path to a public listing runs, quite literally, through its rivals' billing systems. A confidential copy of the Claude developer's IPO prospectus reviewed by Reuters shows that 47% of the company's 2025 sales — roughly $2.16 billion — reached customers through Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud marketplaces, the platforms of two companies that are simultaneously Anthropic's largest investors, its critical computing suppliers and its direct competitors in AI.

The channel dependence comes with a price tag. Anthropic paid about $351 million back to the cloud platforms in distribution fees, according to a Reuters analysis of the filing — suggesting the providers collected roughly 16 cents for every dollar of those marketplace sales. The company reports the fees within its sales, marketing and partnerships expense line.

The filing offers one of the most detailed looks yet at how a frontier AI lab actually makes money. Revenue surged twelvefold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, of which about $3.8 billion came from usage-based consumption of Claude, while subscriptions contributed $789 million. Anthropic told investors it expects consumption revenue to remain "the substantial majority" of sales for the foreseeable future. Nearly two-thirds of total sales came from the United States.

The growth is expensive. Operating losses more than doubled in 2025 to more than $8 billion, and the filing discloses $54.6 billion in non-cancellable hosting and compute commitments at the end of 2025. By early 2026, total long-term commitments exceeded $417 billion, covering 3.5 gigawatts of dedicated computing capacity — part of the roughly $518 billion in future infrastructure obligations reported when the prospectus first surfaced this week.

Anthropic frames the circular relationship as a strength rather than a risk. By selling Claude through Amazon, Google and Microsoft's cloud platforms, the company argues it taps vast enterprise sales networks and reaches customers "already using their services," accelerating market penetration at a scale it says no single organization could directly replicate. Amazon declined to comment; Anthropic and Alphabet did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment.

The disclosure lands as Anthropic seeks a valuation of about $2 trillion in what would be one of the largest IPOs in history, reportedly timed after November's US midterm elections. OpenAI confidentially filed its own registration statement in June and is expected to list by early 2027 — meaning whichever lab goes public first will set Wall Street's reference price for the entire frontier-AI sector.

For investors, the filing crystallizes the central tension of the AI trade: the fastest-growing revenue base in enterprise software is also one of the most concentrated, with distribution, capital and compute all intermediated by a handful of hyperscalers who have every incentive to keep their rival dependent — and every capability to compete with it.