Anthropic relies on Amazon and Google for nearly half its sales
The AI company's IPO filing reveals an increasingly complicated relationship with the tech giants that fund, supply and compete with it.
Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows how heavily the AI developer depends on a small group of customers and technology giants, highlighting key risks as it asks investors to back an ambitious and capital-intensive plan that it says will transform the global economy.
The company routed 47% of its sales to customers last year through cloud partners Amazon and Alphabet's Google, according to a copy of its confidential IPO filing seen by Reuters. The two companies are helping Anthropic distribute its AI models and collect payments from customers, while also serving as major investors, critical suppliers of computing power and direct competitors in AI.
Amazon declined to comment. Anthropic and Alphabet did not respond to requests for comment.
The filing offers a rare look inside a business that barely existed several years ago but is now growing at breakneck speed because of its role as a leading developer of large language models. Anthropic is seeking a valuation of about $2 trillion and plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming years to accelerate its expansion.
Revenue surged 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, while operating losses more than doubled to more than $8 billion, Reuters reported exclusively on Monday. The United States accounted for nearly two-thirds of total sales.
About $3.8 billion of Anthropic's revenue came from customers paying based on their use of the company's Claude AI system, while subscription revenue totaled $789 million. Anthropic said it expects consumption-based revenue to account for "the substantial majority" of its revenue for the foreseeable future.
Sales through cloud marketplaces totaled about $2.16 billion, or 47% of Anthropic's annual revenue in 2025, according to the filing.
The company paid roughly $351 million to the platforms in distribution fees, according to a Reuters analysis, suggesting that the cloud providers collected about 16 cents for every dollar of those sales. Anthropic reports channel partner fees under the "sales, marketing, and partnerships" operating expense line in its financial statements.
The fees are one part of an increasingly circular financial relationship. Amazon and Google have invested tens of billions of dollars in Anthropic, while the AI developer has made enormous commitments to purchase computing capacity.
At the end of 2025, Anthropic had $54.6 billion in non-cancellable hosting and computing commitments. By early 2026, its total long-term commitments had exceeded $417 billion, covering 3.5 gigawatts of dedicated computing capacity.
Anthropic framed these relationships as an advantage in its prospectus. By offering Claude through Amazon, Google and Microsoft's cloud platforms, the company said it can tap their vast sales networks and reach customers that already use their services, accelerating "market penetration at a scale we believe would be difficult for any single organization to directly replicate."
But Anthropic also acknowledged that its reliance on a limited 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 signed a cloud computing deal with Microsoft in November.
The cloud providers also have visibility into Anthropic's pricing and commercial terms, which could influence their decisions on computing allocation and how aggressively they sell its products, according to the filing. The cloud companies are also Anthropic customers, it noted.
Anthropic's dependence on Amazon and Google has grown alongside its revenue. Sales through the two companies rose from 11% of revenue in 2023 to 32% in 2024 and nearly half in 2025.
The company's cash collection is also increasingly being funneled through these third parties. They were responsible for collecting 60% of the $909 million in customer bills outstanding at the end of 2025, up from 42% in 2024. Anthropic warned that disputes or delays in that payment pipeline could hurt cash flow, even though it contracts directly with the customers.
Its customer base is also concentrated. Two unnamed customers each accounted for 12% of revenue last year. Anthropic warned that many of its largest customers are not bound by long-term contracts and could reduce or halt their spending.
The cloud relationships have also complicated financial comparisons with rival OpenAI.
Anthropic records the full value of marketplace contracts, under which customers buy access to Claude through a cloud provider's marketplace, as revenue because it sets the prices and delivers the service. It records the platforms' share as a marketing expense.
OpenAI has told investors and employees that this approach inflates Anthropic's reported revenue by billions of dollars, Reuters reported in June. Anthropic told Reuters at the time that it follows established accounting practices and recognizes gross revenue because it is the "principal" in the transaction.
