Anthropic’s IPO prospectus emphasises Big Tech partnerships
Anthropic’s IPO prospectus reveals its reliance on a limited number of clients and major technology firms, underscoring significant risks for the AI developer as it seeks investor support for its bold, capital-heavy strategy aimed at reshaping the global economy. The company directed 47% of its sales to customers last year via cloud partners Amazon and Alphabet’s Google, as indicated in a copy of its confidential IPO filing. Those two companies, which are enhancing the distribution capabilities for AI developers and managing customer billing on their behalf, are also significant investors in Anthropic, essential providers of computing power, and direct competitors in the AI sector. Amazon refrained from providing a comment. Anthropic and Alphabet declined to provide comments in response to enquiries. The filing provides an uncommon insight into a business that was virtually nonexistent a few years prior but is now experiencing rapid growth, largely attributable to its position as a significant developer of large-language AI models.
Anthropic is pursuing a valuation of approximately $2 trillion and intends to allocate hundreds of billions in the forthcoming years to expedite its growth. Revenue surged twelvefold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, while operating losses more than doubled to exceed $8 billion, as reported on Monday. The United States represented almost two-thirds of overall sales. Approximately $3.8 billion in revenue for Anthropic was generated from customers who paid according to their usage of the Claude AI system, while subscription revenue amounted to $789 million. Anthropic stated that it anticipates consumption-based revenue will represent “the substantial majority” of its revenue for the foreseeable future. Sales via the cloud marketplaces amounted to approximately $2.16 billion, representing 47% of Anthropic’s annual revenue in 2025, according to the filing. The company disbursed approximately $351 million to the platforms in distribution fees, as indicated by an analysis, implying that the cloud providers garnered around 16 cents for each dollar of those sales.
Anthropic includes channel partner fees in the “sales, marketing, and partnerships” operating expense category on its financial statements. The fees represent one component of an increasingly circular financial relationship. Amazon and Google have allocated tens of billions of dollars to Anthropic, while the AI developer has undertaken substantial commitments to procure computing capacity. At the conclusion of 2025, Anthropic reported $54.6 billion in non-cancellable hosting and computing commitments. By early 2026, total long-term commitments surpassed $417 billion, encompassing 3.5 gigawatts of dedicated computing capacity. Anthropic, in its prospectus, framed these relationships as an advantage. It said that by offering its Claude AI model through Amazon, Google and Microsoft’s cloud platforms, it can tap their vast sales networks and reach customers already using their services, accelerating “market penetration at a scale we believe would be difficult for any single organization to directly replicate.”
But the company 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 entered into a cloud computing agreement with Microsoft in November. The cloud providers also gain visibility into Anthropic’s pricing and commercial terms, which could influence their decisions on compute allocation and how aggressively they sell its products, the filing said. The cloud companies are also customers of Anthropic, it noted. Anthropic’s reliance on Amazon and Google has intensified alongside its revenue growth. Sales through the two companies increased from 11% of revenue in 2023 to 32% in 2024, and accounted for nearly half of the total last year. The company’s cash collection is increasingly being channelled through these third parties, which accounted for 60% of the $909 million in outstanding customer bills at the end of 2025, a rise from 42% in 2024.
Anthropic cautioned that disagreements or holdups in that pipeline might negatively impact cash flow, despite its direct contracts with customers. The customer base is notably concentrated, with two unnamed customers accounting for 12% of revenue each in the previous year. Anthropic cautioned that a significant portion of its major clients are not tied to long-term agreements and may decrease or cease their expenditures. The cloud relationships have also complicated financial comparisons with rival OpenAI. Anthropic recognises the entire value of marketplace contracts-sales agreements through which customers purchase access to Claude via a cloud provider’s marketplace-as revenue. This is due to Anthropic’s control over pricing and service delivery, while the portion retained by the platforms is classified as a marketing expense. OpenAI has informed investors and employees that this strategy artificially boosts Anthropic’s reported revenue by billions of dollars, as reported in June. Anthropic informed that it adheres to established accounting practices, recognising gross revenue as it is the “principal” in the transaction.
