SAN FRANCISCO: Anthropic’s initial public offering (IPO) prospectus shows how much it depends on a small group of customers and tech giants, highlighting key risks for the artificial intelligence (AI) developer as it asks investors to back its ambitious, 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.
Those two companies, which are supercharging the AI developer’s distribution and collecting customer bills on its behalf, are also big Anthropic investors, critical suppliers of computing power and direct rivals in AI.
Amazon, Anthropic and Alphabet did not respond to requests seeking comment.
The filing offers a rare look inside a business that barely existed several years ago but is growing at breakneck speed due to its role as a key developer of large-language AI models.
Anthropic is seeking a valuation of about US$2 trillion and has plans to spend hundreds of billions in the coming years to accelerate its growth.
Revenue surged 12-fold in 2025 to nearly US$4.6bil, while operating losses more than doubled to top US$8bil, Reuters reported exclusively.
The United States accounted for nearly two-thirds of total sales.
About US$3.8bil in Anthropic’s revenue came from customers paying based on how much they use the company’s Claude AI system, while subscription revenue came to US$789mil.
Anthropic said it expects consumption-based revenue to account for “the substantial majority” of its revenue for the foreseeable future.
Sales via the cloud marketplaces totalled about US$2.16bil, or 47% of Anthropic’s annual revenue in 2025, the filing shows.
The company paid roughly US$351mil back to the platforms in distribution fees, according to a Reuters analysis, suggesting the cloud providers collected some 16 US cents for every dollar of those sales.
Anthropic reports channel partner fees within the “sales, marketing, and partnerships” operating expense line item on its financial statements.
The fees are one strand 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 buy computing capacity.
At end-2025, Anthropic had US$54.6bil in non-cancellable hosting and computing commitments.
By early 2026, its total long-term commitments exceeded US$417bil, covering 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 organisation 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 signed a cloud computing deal 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 Anthropic’s customers, it noted. — Reuters
