When Anthropic goes public, the biggest winner may not be the venture capital firms that backed it early, but Amazon, which backed a would-be rival and now sells it much of the computing power it runs on. TechCrunch reported on October 28, 2026, drawing on Anthropic’s public S-1 filing, that Amazon’s convertible notes alone were valued at $97.9 billion as of June 30, that Amazon has invested about $18 billion in total, and that Anthropic has committed to spend at least $110 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next ten years.
How Amazon’s Bet Was Structured
Amazon first backed Anthropic in 2023 with a commitment to invest up to $4 billion. Since then it has poured billions more into the company, but instead of taking stock upfront, much of its investment was structured as convertible notes, a type of debt that converts into shares upon an initial public offering or a sale. According to the S-1, Amazon holds convertible notes with $6.2 billion in principal outstanding as of June 30, which is Anthropic’s entire debt load.
As Anthropic’s valuation soared across successive funding rounds, the shares those notes will convert into became far more valuable. Amazon’s own filings valued its note holdings at $97.9 billion as of June 30, a figure that dwarfs the $8 billion Amazon invested in the notes from 2023 through 2025. The surge also had an accounting consequence for Anthropic: it had to record the growing value of what it owes on its income statement, under a line for changes in the fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities, and SAFEs, which totalled $72.4 billion for the first half of 2026. That charge is non-cash, but it shows how large Amazon’s paper gain has become.
Amazon’s notes could convert into as many as 1.84 billion shares, according to the S-1, but a cap limits Amazon to 12 percent of Anthropic’s partially diluted share count, a figure that counts some shares not yet issued, such as stock options. Amazon can waive the cap; unconverted notes will stay outstanding for later quarters. Beyond the notes, Amazon further invested $10 billion in nonvoting preferred stock in the second quarter, $5 billion in each of Anthropic’s last two funding rounds, bringing its total investment to about $18 billion.
Why Venture Firms Win Less, Relatively
Stakes held by firms including Menlo Ventures, Sequoia, Sound Ventures, and Spark Capital are expected to return billions, but none of those firms owns 5 percent, the threshold for inclusion in the S-1’s principal stockholders’ table. That is highly unusual for a technology IPO, where lead investors typically hold double-digit percentages. The reason is Anthropic’s size: at its $965 billion private valuation, a 1 percent stake is worth nearly $10 billion, so Menlo’s roughly $14 billion position is only about 1.5 percent of the company, according to Bloomberg figures cited by TechCrunch.
In other words, the venture firms will make a great deal of money, but they will not control the company, and their returns will be dwarfed, in absolute terms, by the strategic investors who bought larger stakes. Google, too, is set for a major windfall: it held about 14 percent of Anthropic as of early last year, according to court filings, and has invested more since, including $10 billion in April, though a PitchBook analyst estimates its current stake at closer to 5.6 percent after dilution in later rounds. Google has also secured at least $114 billion in cloud commitments from Anthropic through 2033.
The Cloud Bill Behind The Windfall
Beyond stock gains, Amazon will continue to earn significant revenue from Anthropic as a customer. Anthropic has committed to spend at least $110 billion on AWS over the next ten years, a commitment that turns Amazon from an investor into Anthropic’s landlord for computing power. The S-1 itself warns that some cloud providers also build rival AI models and may not always want the same things Anthropic does.
Why It Matters
This matters because it reframes what an AI IPO actually tests. The question is not only whether investors will pay a high price for Anthropic’s shares, but whether a business model in which a lab’s largest investors are also its largest suppliers and its rivals can work at public-market scale. If it can, the pattern will spread, and the next generation of AI companies will be funded, housed, and partly owned by the same cloud giants. If it cannot, the conflicts built into the S-1, between Anthropic’s interests and its suppliers’ interests, will be the first place to look. The filing itself is already on the public record, as Anthropic’s public S-1 filing for a Nasdaq listing showed, and the US government’s own dealings with the company, including Claude’s 40 percent discount for US agencies under OneGov, show how widely its fortunes are now entangled with institutions far beyond Silicon Valley.
Background
Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, is the maker of the Claude family of AI models, sold to businesses on a consumption basis and through paid subscription tiers. Amazon first invested in Anthropic in 2023 and has since invested about $18 billion in total, through convertible notes and preferred stock. A convertible note is debt that converts into shares when a company goes public or is sold, rather than being repaid in cash.
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