As U.S. artificial intelligence company Anthropic pursues an initial public offering targeting a valuation of $2 trillion, or about 2,700 trillion won, its heavy reliance on a handful of Big Tech firms such as Amazon and Google is emerging as a risk factor. Anthropic is sustaining explosive growth, but nearly half of its total revenue flows through the cloud sales networks of those two companies. Some observers say the complex business ties with Big Tech firms that are both investors and competitors could weigh on the company's valuation during the listing process.
According to Reuters on the 29th, Anthropic's IPO filing showed that revenue generated last year through the cloud marketplaces of Amazon and Google, the two firms' software sales platforms, came to about $2.16 billion. That is about 47% of total revenue of roughly $4.6 billion, meaning nearly half of the company's sales came through the software distribution platforms of Amazon and Google.
As Anthropic has rapidly expanded, its dependence on the two companies has also climbed steeply. The share of revenue routed through Amazon and Google jumped from 11% in 2023 to 32% in 2024, then surged to nearly half last year. Anthropic's revenue grew 12-fold from a year earlier, but much of that came from tapping Big Tech customer networks.
A cloud marketplace is an enterprise platform run by a cloud provider that allows companies to buy software and AI services. Through these platforms, Amazon and Google connect Anthropic's AI model, Claude, to corporate customers and handle billing on its behalf. Anthropic paid about $351 million for those services last year, or roughly 16 cents in fees for every dollar of revenue generated through the marketplaces. The company books the expense under "sales, marketing and partnerships" operating costs in its financial statements.
Reuters noted that Amazon and Google are not merely sales partners. Both are major investors in Anthropic and key suppliers of computing resources, and they are also competitors developing their own AI models. That is the backdrop for concerns that Anthropic's sales, funding and computing infrastructure are all concentrated in a small number of Big Tech firms. Reuters said Amazon and Google have invested tens of billions of dollars in Anthropic, which in turn has committed to purchasing vast amounts of computing capacity, describing it as one facet of an increasingly circular financial relationship between the two sides.
Anthropic has acknowledged some of those concerns. The company said the arrangement creates complex dynamics that could give rise to conflicts of interest and negatively affect its access to computing resources.
Still, the company also stresses that cooperation with Big Tech is a key driver of its rapid growth. Offering Claude through large cloud platforms such as those of Amazon and Google allows Anthropic to immediately tap the extensive sales networks and corporate customer bases those companies have built.
Questions have also surfaced over its accounting treatment. When a customer buys Claude through a cloud marketplace, Anthropic recognizes the entire amount as its own revenue, on the grounds that it sets the price and provides the service. Fees taken by platform operators such as Amazon and Google are treated separately as expenses.
Rival OpenAI, however, has taken issue with the approach, arguing that it makes Anthropic look larger than it actually is. OpenAI is said to contend that Anthropic's revenue is inflated because of the accounting method.
