Anthropic now sells close to half of its Claude business through the three biggest cloud companies. Bloomberg reported on Oct. 26 that the company’s IPO filing cites a growing reliance on Google, Amazon and Microsoft, and the headline number is stark: cloud marketplace sales through those three represented 48% of Anthropic’s revenue in the first half of 2026, up from 11% in 2023.
That 37-point jump reshapes how we should read the company’s prospectus. We already covered the Anthropic IPO paradox between huge sales and huge losses. This piece goes after a different question: who actually owns the customer relationship, and what does Anthropic cloud marketplace revenue mean for a company that also owes those same partners tens of billions of dollars in computing spend?
Below we walk through the verified figures, the contract commitments, the cost of using channel partners, the competitive picture, and five predictions. We also flag what the filing coverage does not tell us, because commission rates and executive commentary remain unconfirmed as of today.
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What the Filing Shows: 48% of Sales Through Three Clouds
The core finding is simple to state. Customers buy Claude through their existing Google, Amazon and Microsoft cloud accounts. The cloud provider bills the customer, keeps a fee or commission, and passes the remainder to Anthropic. In the first half of 2026 those marketplace sales made up 48% of Anthropic’s revenue. In 2023 the same channel made up 11%.
Yahoo Finance framed the result as Anthropic relying on the three companies for nearly half its revenue. Business Insider’s Markets Insider desk used a sharper label, calling the three companies Big Tech rivals, a nod to the fact that each of them also builds or sells competing AI products.
Two things stand out. First, the dependence is not new, it is accelerating. Second, the dependence runs in both directions. Anthropic needs the clouds for distribution, and it also commits to spend heavily on their infrastructure. The marketplace share is the revenue side of a relationship whose cost side we examine further down.
How Cloud Marketplace Sales of Claude Work
A cloud marketplace sale is not a typical software deal. A company that already has an Amazon, Google or Microsoft cloud account can add Claude to that account and receive one bill. There is no separate vendor onboarding, no new contract with Anthropic’s finance team, and often no new security review, because the cloud provider is already an approved supplier.
For the model maker, the trade is clear. Anthropic gives up part of each sale and gets access to buyers who already have budget approved and procurement paths open. The provider acts as billing agent, collector and distributor, which is why Claude enterprise sales can move faster through these channels than through a direct sales cycle.
What we cannot say is how big the cut is. The coverage we reviewed does not disclose the commission rates Google, Amazon or Microsoft retain, and we are not going to guess. We can only measure the cost indirectly, through Anthropic’s own expense lines, which we do in the section on sales and marketing spend.
From 11% to 48%: The Three-Year Climb in Numbers
The filing material gives us four data points on how much of Anthropic’s revenue flows through its cloud partners. One caveat matters: the 2024 and 2025 figures cover Amazon and Alphabet’s Google only, while the first-half 2026 figure adds Microsoft. The series is therefore not perfectly like for like.
| Period | Share of Anthropic revenue via cloud channels | Channels counted |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 11% | Cloud marketplaces |
| 2024 | 32% | Amazon and Google |
| 2025 | 47% (about $2.16 billion) | Amazon and Google |
| First half of 2026 | 48% | Google, Amazon and Microsoft |
Read the table in two ways. From 2023 to the first half of 2026 the share rose 37 percentage points and grew about 4.4 times. But the steepest climb came earlier, with a 21-point jump from 2023 to 2024 and another 15 points in 2025. The first half of 2026 added just one more point, even with Microsoft in the count.
That flattening could mean the channel is maturing, or it could mean direct sales are growing about as fast as marketplace sales. The data we have cannot separate the two explanations. What it does show is that cloud marketplaces are no longer a side door. They are the main entrance.
Q2 Results: $11.6 Billion in Revenue, $974 Million in Operating Profit
Anthropic reported $11.6 billion in second-quarter revenue and $974 million in operating profit, according to the filing coverage. That works out to an operating margin of roughly 8.4%, a figure we calculated from those two numbers. For a company at this stage of the AI buildout, a positive operating line is notable on its own.
It also puts the 48% share in perspective. If marketplace channels keep carrying a share near half of revenue, then a large slice of that $11.6 billion quarter passed through a partner’s billing system first. We cannot translate the first-half percentage into a dollar total, because the sources we reviewed give the first-half share but not the first-half revenue figure.
Our earlier reporting on the 22 banks and the Nasdaq ANT listing covered the offering mechanics. The new angle here is the quality of the revenue. Revenue that arrives through three large partners is easier to scale, but it is also concentrated, and investors will want to weigh that concentration.
The Compute Bill: $269.4 Billion in Commitments to the Same Partners
The revenue story is only half the picture. Anthropic committed to spend at least $114.5 billion with Google through 2033, $110 billion with Amazon through 2036, and $44.9 billion with Microsoft. Citybiz tied those commitments directly to the revenue story, noting that the cloud partners drive nearly half of revenue even as computing obligations mount.
| Cloud partner | Minimum spend commitment | Term | Share of the $269.4B total |
|---|---|---|---|
| $114.5 billion | Through 2033 | 42.5% | |
| Amazon | $110 billion | Through 2036 | 40.8% |
| Microsoft | $44.9 billion | End date not in our sources | 16.7% |
| Total | $269.4 billion | Mixed | 100% |
The total and the percentage splits are our arithmetic on the reported figures. The point is the loop. Anthropic sells Claude through these three clouds, pays them a fee on those sales, and also promises to buy hundreds of billions of dollars of compute from them. Money flows from Anthropic to the clouds twice, once as channel cost and once as infrastructure spend.
Google leads on the dollar commitment, Amazon has the longest stated horizon, and Microsoft is the smallest of the three. That ordering matters for negotiating leverage. A partner with a bigger committed contract has more reason to promote Claude, but also more power if renewal terms ever come up.
Channel Costs: Sales Expenses Jump From $120 Million to $3.2 Billion
The best window into what the channel costs is Anthropic’s expense line. Sales, marketing and partner-related expenses rose from $120 million in the first half of the prior year to $3.2 billion in the first half of 2026, a roughly 27-fold increase. Payments to channel partners alone increased by $2.7 billion.
The overall line grew by about $3.08 billion. If both figures come from the same expense category, the $2.7 billion rise in partner payments would account for around 88% of that increase. We flag that as our own inference. The filing coverage presents the numbers as related, but we have not seen the accounting breakdown.
Even without a commission rate, the direction is obvious. As more revenue moves through marketplaces, more cash leaves as partner payments. The trade-off is that Anthropic avoids building a global enterprise sales force at the same speed, and the cloud providers shoulder billing, collections and customer support entry points.
Why Enterprises Buy Claude Through Their Cloud Accounts
From a buyer’s side, the logic is practical and has little to do with the model itself. Most large companies already negotiate cloud contracts once a year, and AI spending is easier to approve when it sits inside an existing agreement.
Procurement and billing simplicity
Buying through a marketplace means one invoice, one vendor record and one set of legal terms the buyer has already signed. A procurement team that would take months to approve a new software vendor can often turn around a marketplace purchase in days. That speed is a real product feature, even though it never appears on a spec sheet.
Where it shows up in pricing
Each cloud also wraps Claude in its own pricing structure. We broke down Amazon Bedrock’s Flex, Priority and Batch tiers and the Microsoft Foundry price ladder in separate pieces. Buyers comparing Claude across clouds should expect the same model to arrive with different tiers, quotas and billing terms depending on where it is purchased.
Frenemies: Partners, Suppliers and Rivals at Once
One headline captured the tension well. Futunn’s coverage described the three companies as both friend and foe while holding Anthropic’s distribution channels. Google sells its own Gemini models, and Amazon and Microsoft also promote their own AI offerings alongside Claude. Each of them lists a product that competes with the one Anthropic is trying to sell through their stores.
A US News exclusive dated Sept. 29 had already described the prospectus as laying bare Anthropic’s deep dependence on its Big Tech partners. The Oct. 26 coverage added the 48% figure and the computing commitments, which sharpened the picture.
The risk is not that a cloud provider will drop Claude tomorrow. Dropping the model would hurt the provider’s own enterprise customers. The risk is quieter. A partner could change placement, bundle discounts toward its in-house model, or tighten terms at renewal. Anthropic would feel any of those through the 48% of revenue that flows past these gatekeepers.
Claude Enterprise Sales and the Model Cadence
A sales channel is only as strong as the product moving through it. Anthropic shipped its Claude 5.5 line this autumn, covering the Opus, Sonnet and Haiku tiers, according to the company’s release notes. Marketplace distribution means each launch can reach enterprise customers through three storefronts at once rather than through a single direct API.
That gives the cloud channels a second job. They are not only a billing layer, they are also a launch amplifier. When a new Claude model lands in a customer’s existing cloud console, the switching cost from the previous version is a configuration change. For readers who want the model-level picture, our comparison of GPT-6.1 Sol, Sonnet 5.5 and Gemini 4 Argon covers pricing and capability side by side.
Competitive Comparison: Direct Sales vs Cloud Marketplace
The table below compares the two routes by the factors that matter to a buyer and to Anthropic. It is a qualitative comparison based on how the marketplace model works in the reported structure, not a set of published terms.
| Factor | Direct from Anthropic | Via Google, Amazon or Microsoft |
|---|---|---|
| Who bills the customer | Anthropic | The cloud provider |
| Who keeps a fee | No intermediary | The cloud provider (rate not disclosed) |
| Procurement path | New vendor contract | Existing cloud agreement |
| Customer relationship | Anthropic owns it | Shared with the provider |
| Speed to first purchase | Slower for large firms | Faster for existing cloud buyers |
| Share of H1 2026 revenue | Remainder after 48% | 48% |
The trade is margin for reach. A direct sale keeps the full price and the full customer relationship, but it takes a bigger sales force and a longer procurement cycle. A marketplace sale gives up a fee and some visibility into the buyer, in exchange for volume and speed. At 48% of revenue, Anthropic has clearly chosen reach.
Historical Context: Three Years of Growing Channel Dependence
In 2023 the cloud channel was a modest add-on at 11% of revenue. By 2024 it had risen to 32%, then to 47% for the combined Amazon and Google share in 2025. The earlier filing figures put that 2025 slice at approximately $2.16 billion.
This pattern fits a wider trend in enterprise software, where buyers prefer to consolidate purchases inside one of a few cloud accounts. Model makers followed the buyers. The company that wanted large enterprise revenue had to be present where the enterprise budget already lived.
What changed in 2026 is the scale of the matching obligations. The computing commitments of $114.5 billion, $110 billion and $44.9 billion show that the relationship moved from a sales channel to a structural dependency on both the revenue and the cost side.
Market Impact: What It Means for Investors, Clouds and Rivals
For IPO investors, the 48% number is a concentration disclosure. A buyer of Anthropic shares is also underwriting the health of its partner relationships. If a partner reprices, reshuffles placement or builds a closer substitute, a big share of revenue feels it. Investors will likely want to see how fast direct sales and other channels grow in coming quarters.
For the cloud providers, the story is mostly positive. Marketplace sales of Claude pull enterprise AI spending onto their platforms, and the computing commitments lock in demand for years. Google through 2033 and Amazon through 2036 are long horizons for any customer contract.
For rival model makers, the lesson is about distribution. A model that is excellent but sold through a single direct channel may lose deals to one that sits in the buyer’s existing console. That is part of why governments and large organizations are also reviewing which AI tools they allow, as in our report on Sweden blocking ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot. Procurement rules shape adoption as much as benchmarks do.
Five Predictions for Anthropic’s Channel Strategy
These are our own forecasts, based on the reported figures. They are not statements from Anthropic or its partners.
- The marketplace share stays near half through 2026. The move from 47% to 48% suggests the rapid climb is levelling off, so a reading between roughly 45% and 55% in the next disclosure looks most likely.
- Direct enterprise sales get more investment. A company that hands partners billions in channel payments has a clear incentive to grow the share it keeps in full.
- Disclosure of commission terms becomes an investor question. Once a public company has a large channel cost, analysts tend to ask for the rate or at least a range.
- Committed spend becomes a negotiating chip. With $269.4 billion on the table across three partners, renewals and placement terms will tie revenue share and compute pricing together.
- Multi-cloud availability remains a selling point. Buyers want to avoid lock-in, so offering Claude across all three clouds stays a core pitch for Claude enterprise sales.
What Remains Unconfirmed
Several details are still missing. The commission rates retained by Google, Amazon and Microsoft are not disclosed in the coverage we reviewed. Neither are the splits between the three partners in the 48% figure. We also found no direct, attributed quotation from an Anthropic, Google, Amazon or Microsoft executive about the dependence, so this article quotes none.
We also avoid turning the percentages into dollar totals where the underlying revenue base is not in our sources. For the wider category of AI platform coverage, see our AI and machine learning section, where we track the filing as new details emerge.
FAQ: Anthropic, Cloud Marketplaces and the Big Three
What share of Anthropic’s revenue comes from Google, Amazon and Microsoft?
Cloud marketplace sales through the three companies represented 48% of Anthropic’s revenue in the first half of 2026, compared with 11% in 2023, per the filing coverage from Bloomberg and Yahoo Finance.
How do customers buy Claude through these clouds?
Customers buy Claude through their existing Google, Amazon or Microsoft cloud accounts. The provider bills the customer, keeps a fee or commission, and sends the rest to Anthropic.
How much commission do the cloud providers take?
That is not confirmed. The sources we reviewed do not state any commission rate. What is reported is that sales, marketing and partner-related expenses rose from $120 million to $3.2 billion in the first half of 2026, with channel partner payments up by $2.7 billion.
How much has Anthropic committed to spend on cloud computing?
At least $114.5 billion with Google through 2033, $110 billion with Amazon through 2036, and $44.9 billion with Microsoft. Together that is $269.4 billion by our addition.
Is Anthropic profitable?
The reported second-quarter figures show $11.6 billion in revenue and $974 million in operating profit. Our own calculation puts that at about an 8.4% operating margin for the quarter. Our earlier coverage of the IPO filing discusses the company’s larger loss picture.
Why is the dependence on cloud partners a risk?
The same companies provide a large share of Anthropic’s distribution and also receive a large share of its infrastructure spending. They also sell competing AI products. Changes in placement, pricing or renewal terms would hit a big slice of revenue.
Did any executive comment on the 48% figure?
We found no direct, attributed quotation from an Anthropic, Google, Amazon or Microsoft executive in the coverage reviewed for this article, so we do not quote any.
