Anthropic IPO filing reveals heavy reliance on a few cloud partners and customers

Anthropic's initial public offering prospectus disclosed that the AI firm’s 2025 revenue of nearly $4.6 billion was heavily dependent on a limited set of cloud platforms and a few major customers. Sales through Amazon and Google marketplaces accounted for about 47% of total revenue, with the company paying roughly $351 million in distribution fees to those platforms. The filing also noted that two unnamed customers each contributed 12% of the year’s revenue, and that many of its largest clients lack long-term contracts.

The company reported a 12-fold increase in revenue year-over-year, while operating losses more than doubled to over $8 billion. Consumption-based fees for its Claude AI system generated $3.8 billion, and subscription revenue reached $789 million. Anthropic expects usage-based revenue to remain the "substantial majority" of its earnings going forward.

Anthropic highlighted the risk of its reliance on a small group of partners, stating that such dependence could create conflicts of interest and affect access to computing resources. At the end of 2025, the firm had $54.6 billion in non-cancellable hosting and computing commitments, and by early 2026 its total long-term commitments exceeded $417 billion, covering 3.5 gigawatts of dedicated capacity.

The prospectus also explained that Anthropic records gross marketplace sales as revenue, treating the cloud providers’ cuts as marketing expenses, a practice OpenAI has criticized as inflating reported revenue. Anthropic defended the approach as consistent with standard accounting rules.

Amazon declined to comment on the filing, and neither Anthropic nor Alphabet responded to requests for comment.