Anthropic / 29 September 2026

Anthropic routes nearly half its sales through cloud rivals

Anthropic routed 47% of its 2025 sales through Amazon and Google cloud marketplaces, according to figures in a confidential IPO prospectus reviewed by Reuters and reported on 29 September. The $2.16 billion channel made two companies simultaneously major distributors, compute suppliers, investors and AI competitors. Reuters calculated that Anthropic paid about $351 million in marketplace distribution fees, roughly 16 cents for each dollar sold there. Two unnamed customers each supplied another 12% of total revenue. The figures reveal how quickly Claude has reached enterprise buyers through incumbent clouds, while showing that a meaningful share of Anthropic's customer access and cash collection runs through partners with their own strategic interests.

Usage-based payments for Claude accounted for about $3.8 billion of Anthropic's nearly $4.6 billion revenue last year, while subscriptions supplied $789 million, Reuters reported from the document. The company expects consumption billing to remain the substantial majority of revenue. Its marketplaces therefore matter beyond initial customer acquisition: as customers build Claude into production applications, the hosting partner may keep billing and distribution economics on repeated usage. The cloud channel's share grew from 11% of Anthropic revenue in 2023 to 32% in 2024 and 47% in 2025. That progression suggests channel dependence grew with the business rather than disappearing as Anthropic gained brand recognition and a direct sales organization.

The partners collected 60% of the $909 million in customer bills outstanding at the end of 2025, up from 42% a year earlier, according to Reuters. That makes the arrangement a working-capital question as well as a sales-channel question: delays or disputes in collections can affect when Anthropic receives cash even where it contracts directly with a customer. Amazon and Google also provide computing capacity, and Microsoft is now part of the company's distribution and infrastructure network. Anthropic told prospective investors that those salesforces give it ‘market penetration’ at a scale it could scarcely replicate alone. It also described potential conflicts over compute allocation, pricing visibility and promotion of rivals' models when the same partners supply, sell and compete.

Revenue concentration adds another layer. The two unnamed customers together contributed about 24% of 2025 revenue, and the prospectus says many large accounts are not bound to long-term spending levels. The United States supplied nearly two-thirds of sales. These details matter to a business valued on continued rapid growth: one customer's decision to cut usage or a cloud partner's change in marketplace terms could affect both revenue and the path to collecting it. OpenAI previously argued that Anthropic's recognition of gross marketplace revenue inflated comparisons between the two companies. Anthropic responded that it is the principal in those transactions and follows established accounting practice, Reuters reported. The disagreement is about presentation and economic interpretation, not a finding that sales did not occur.

Anthropic's new Claude Marketplace, announced the previous week, gives some enterprise buyers a way to use committed Anthropic spend on partner products. It is a different channel from Amazon and Google marketplaces, yet it points in the same direction: distribution networks can speed adoption while making the boundary of the model provider's own business more complex. The IPO figures give prospective shareholders a basis to distinguish the gross amount paid for Claude, the cost of acquiring and servicing that usage, and the leverage retained by intermediaries. A cloud provider that also develops AI models can influence a customer's choice at procurement and deployment, where Anthropic must persuade buyers to select Claude repeatedly.