Anthropic Disclosed Its Reliance on Google, Amazon, and Microsoft Ahead of Its IPO. What Is the Risk?

Anthropic is becoming increasingly dependent on Google, Amazon, and Microsoft: sales through their cloud platforms accounted for nearly half of Claude’s revenue in the first half of 2026. At the same time, the company pays its cloud partners for distribution and has committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars on their computing power.

As a result, the three largest cloud providers have simultaneously become Anthropic’s investors, computing power providers, sales channels, and competitors. The company explicitly identifies this combination of roles as a source of risk in its prospectus.

Sales through Google, Amazon, and Microsoft cloud marketplaces accounted for 48% of Anthropic’s revenue in the first half of 2026, compared with 11% in 2023. This is stated in the company’s IPO prospectus, published on October 26. Cloud providers bill Anthropic’s customers and transfer their payments to Anthropic after deducting their commissions. In the first half of the year, the commissions that Claude’s developer paid to its cloud partners for distribution rose by $2.7 billion year-over-year.

Cloud-based sales have fueled Anthropic's rapid growth, according to Bloomberg. In the second quarter, Anthropic's revenue reached $11.6 billion, and its operating profit totaled $974 million.

At the same time, Anthropic outlined significant commitments to purchase computing capacity in its prospectus: at least $114.5 billion from Google through 2033, $110 billion from Amazon through 2036, and $44.9 billion from Microsoft. In addition, Anthropic expects to spend another $125–150 billion on additional computing capacity based on chips from Google and other suppliers between 2028 and 2031.

In its IPO filings, Anthropic refers to cloud providers as “investors, customers, distribution partners, and competitors” all at once. Anthropic warns that these companies have access to information about its pricing and commercial terms and may favor their own AI models. Furthermore, its relationships with them have already attracted the attention of antitrust regulators and may continue to do so in the future. Moving computing workloads to other providers would be “costly and labor-intensive” and could reduce the efficiency of computing resource utilization, Anthropic acknowledged.

Anthropic has previously been criticized for engaging in “circular transactions” within the tech ecosystem, where the same companies simultaneously invest in and withdraw funds from its balance sheet, according to Bloomberg. For example, Anthropic is a major customer of Amazon Web Services, using Amazon’s data centers and chips to train and run its Claude models, while Amazon offers Claude through its Bedrock platform. Similarly, Anthropic uses Google’s own AI chips, and Google sells Claude through its own cloud platform.

Amazon and Google are among Anthropic’s largest shareholders. Following the conversion of preferred shares and certain debt instruments in connection with the IPO, each company will own more than 5% of Anthropic, according to the prospectus. However, their shares do not carry voting rights.

Amazon has invested approximately $18 billion in Anthropic since 2023 and has committed to investing up to an additional $15 billion, subject to certain conditions. Convertible debt instruments could also give Amazon up to 10.9% of Anthropic’s equity, based on full dilution as of June, excluding the shares it already owns. Amazon’s stake is capped at 12%, unless the company waives that cap.

Google has invested approximately $23 billion in Anthropic and has committed to investing an additional $20 billion upon the achievement of certain milestones. Its stake is capped at 14.99%, although Google may also choose to waive this limit.

Anthropic’s IPO will test whether public investors are willing to invest in artificial intelligence-related businesses amid growing concerns about massive infrastructure spending, Bloomberg reports.The company’s third-quarter revenue growth disappointed Wall Street and intensified the sell-off in tech stocks amid concerns that investment in AI is outpacing demand, Bloomberg concludes.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor