Anthropic's $2 trillion IPO reveals its weakness: 47% of its revenue depends on Amazon and Google, and it takes 16 cents for every dollar it spends.

Anthropic's $2 trillion IPO reveals its weakness: 47% of its revenue depends on Amazon and Google, and it takes 16 cents for every dollar it spends.

Anthropic's IPO prospectus, submitted to investors, for the first time brought to the forefront its complex financial relationships with Amazon and Google.

According to a confidential document obtained by Reuters on September 29, nearly half of Anthropic's revenue in 2025 will be generated through the platforms of these two cloud giants, who simultaneously play the roles of investor, computing power provider, and direct competitor.

According to its prospectus, Anthropic's revenue reached nearly $4.6 billion in 2025, a year-on-year increase of approximately 12 times, but its operating loss more than doubled to over $8 billion during the same period. Behind this rapid growth lies an increasingly deep structural dependence on a few partners—a risk that Anthropic has explicitly listed in its prospectus.

47% of the revenue flows through the hands of these two giants.

According to the prospectus, in 2025, Anthropic's sales through Amazon and Google (a subsidiary of Alphabet) cloud platforms totaled approximately $2.16 billion , accounting for 47% of its total revenue for the year.

This proportion has been steadily rising – from only 11% in 2023 to 32% in 2024, and nearly half last year.

Reuters estimates that Anthropic paid approximately $351 million in distribution fees to the two platforms, meaning that for every dollar of cloud platform revenue generated, about 16 cents went to Amazon or Google . This expense was recorded under "Sales, Marketing, and Partners" operating expenses in Anthropic's financial statements.

Investors, suppliers, distributors, and competitors – a four-in-one relationship

The complexity of this financial relationship goes far beyond that.

Amazon and Google play four roles simultaneously: injecting tens of billions of dollars into Anthropic, providing it with computing infrastructure, collecting payments from its customers, and directly competing with it in the field of AI.

As of the end of 2025, Anthropic's irrevocable hosting and computing power procurement commitments totaled $54.6 billion . By early 2026, its total long-term commitments had exceeded $417 billion , covering 3.5 gigawatts of dedicated computing power capacity.

In its prospectus, Anthropic characterized the above relationship as a competitive advantage, stating that by distributing the Claude model through the cloud platforms of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, it can reach existing customers through its vast sales network and achieve "a market penetration scale that we believe is difficult for any single entity to directly replicate."

However, the prospectus also acknowledges that the reliance on a few partners and suppliers "has created complex and dynamic relationships that may lead to conflicts of interest and have an adverse impact on our access to computing resources."

The document also points out that cloud service providers can see Anthropic's pricing and commercial terms, which may influence their decisions regarding computing power allocation and product promotion efforts.

The two major clients each account for 12%, and neither has a long-term contract.

Customer concentration is also a major risk.

The prospectus shows that two unnamed customers each contributed 12% of Anthropic's annual revenue.

Anthropic warned that most of its major clients are not bound by long-term contracts and could cut or stop spending at any time.

Regarding accounts receivable, as of the end of 2025, Anthropic had $909 million in outstanding customer receivables, 60% of which were collected on behalf of Amazon and Google, up from 42% in 2024. Anthropic cautioned that if disputes or delays occur in this环节 (link/step), even if the company has direct contracts with customers, its cash flow could still be impacted.

The dispute over revenue metrics with OpenAI

This prospectus also brings the dispute between Anthropic and OpenAI over revenue accounting methods back to the forefront.

Anthropic records the full amount of its cloud platform marketplace contracts as revenue and its platform share as marketing costs—based on the fact that Anthropic, as the “primary party” to the transaction, is responsible for pricing and service delivery, which complies with accounting standards.

However, according to a Reuters report in June of this year, OpenAI told investors and employees that this practice had inflated Anthropic's revenue by billions of dollars.

In response, Anthropic stated that the company follows established accounting standards and recognizes total revenue because it is a "major party" in the transaction.

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