Anthropic Sold 48% of Revenue Through Cloud Marketplaces, and Buyers Can Leave

Anthropic sold 48% of its first-half revenue through the cloud marketplaces run by its compute suppliers, according to the S-1 it filed with the SEC on October 26. Revenue for the six months to June 30 was $16.3 billion, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier. The marketplace share climbed from 11% in 2023 to 32% in 2024 and 47% in 2025, and has held near half since. By our math, about $7.8 billion of first-half revenue was billed through a cloud provider.

The public filing confirms what the Wall Street Journal reported from a draft on October 20: $16.3 billion of first-half revenue and an $80.7 billion net loss. Of that loss, $72.4 billion was a change in the fair value of convertible notes and similar instruments. The operating loss was $693 million. The filing arrives a month after Anthropic pushed its listing back. It adds the go-to-market detail the draft coverage lacked, from the channel the money came through to the accounts behind it and what holds those accounts in place.

The filing names the motion itself. Anthropic's strategy "relies substantially on organic adoption rather than a large direct sales organization," in the words of its risk factors. Developers and individual users bring Claude in, and direct sellers arrive once it's already in use. The cloud providers' marketplaces carry the purchase, which we’d call marketplace-led growth. At Anthropic's scale the cloud listing works as a second sales channel, well beyond a procurement shortcut.

Organic adoption landed the accounts, and cloud marketplaces billed half

Customers paying Anthropic $100,000 or more over a trailing year rose from about 1,500 at the end of 2025 to more than 11,900 on September 30. A year earlier there were more than 950. More than 1,900 now pay $1 million or more, and about 250 pay $10 million or more. The $100,000-plus group produced $12.0 billion, or 74%, of first-half revenue. Behind them sit roughly 40 million customers who each spend less than $100,000 a year.

The filing describes how those accounts form. Use often starts with one engineer or one workflow (Claude Code inside a development team is its main example) and spreads into legal, finance and customer operations. Direct sellers then turn existing use into an executive sponsor. More than half of the $100,000-plus customers used both the developer platform and at least one Anthropic app in the third quarter, up from about 30% in the fourth quarter of 2025. Anthropic puts its net revenue retention at about 900% as of September 30.

The marketplaces turn that adoption into a purchase. Claude is sold on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, inside the security reviews and cloud commitments enterprises already run. The filing credits the providers' field sellers with reach no single company could build. Anthropic keeps a direct contract with each customer and pays the provider a fee, which lets it set price and avoid channel conflict. The pool those purchases draw on is large. In October 2025, Omdia estimated close to $470 billion in commitments across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Customers can spend part of that on third-party software in the marketplaces.

The motion's main cost is partner fees

Sales, marketing and partnerships spending was $3.17 billion in the first half, or 19% of revenue, against $120 million and 10% a year earlier. The filing attributes $2.7 billion of the $3.0 billion increase to fees paid to channel partners and $273 million to marketing. Anthropic calls the approach structurally efficient, and next to an enterprise software company's sales payroll it is. By our math, though, the added partner fees alone equal about 17% of first-half revenue. Reuters read the confidential draft in September and estimated the cloud providers kept about 16 cents of every marketplace dollar in 2025, or $351 million on $2.16 billion of sales.

A vendor running this motion swaps quota-carrying headcount for a take rate. The fee starts small but it grows with every dollar of revenue. Unlike a sales team, it never gets cheaper per dollar unless the vendor renegotiates.

The filing leaves out several numbers a GTM leader would want. It doesn't split revenue by cloud provider or state the fee rate. The trailing-year revenue share of the $100,000-plus accounts and the run-rate figure are still blank pending a price range. The 900% retention figure counts every customer with at least $1 of revenue in the base quarter, so it measures how fast small starts expand more than how sticky large accounts are. Figures for the months after June 30 are unaudited.

Usage without long-term contracts is the exposure OpenAI is pricing against

Consumption billing, metered in tokens, produced $13.1 billion, or 80%, of first-half revenue. The filing is blunt about what that means for retention. Anthropic's top five customers were about 25% of revenue for the nine months to September 30, and none was above 10%. Many of its top customers have no long-term contract, or one that expires soon, and are "able to reduce or in some cases cease spending at any time." Usage also dips with customers' calendars. Total customer spend fell about 20% in the two weeks to January 2 against the two weeks before. We flagged that kind of swing when Anthropic's usage curve first reached boards.

OpenAI's account-by-account discounts are aimed at that opening. A customer paying for tokens without a commitment can move volume fast. Rippling shifted most of its engineers' coding work from Anthropic to OpenAI in about five months. A marketplace listing makes a second lab one more line on the same cloud bill. Product-led adoption lands accounts cheaply, and the same openness lets them leave cheaply.

The case against reading this as fragile sits in the same filing. Concentration is falling. Seventy-nine percent of third-quarter revenue came from outside the top five, up from 64% in the first quarter, even as each of the top five set a spending record. D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria told Fortune that no company in history had grown this fast this efficiently. Anthropic is also moving large accounts onto non-cancelable annual or multi-year contracts with minimum spend in exchange for a committed price list. Those contracts left $10.8 billion of remaining performance obligations at June 30, about 75% of it due within 12 months. By our math, that contracted next-year revenue is about a quarter of the first half's annualized rate. The commitment push is real, but it still covers a minority of the business. We described the same push when Anthropic's draft prospectus and SpaceX's filing went public.

What this means for AI vendors and their enterprise buyers

If you sell AI software, find out which clouds your target accounts have committed spend on and get listed in those marketplaces before your next enterprise push. Anthropic billed nearly half its revenue that way. A buyer can often draw down a budget it has already approved faster than it can add a new vendor. Price the provider's fee in from the start, using your own listing terms. Reuters' estimate of about 16% shows what the fee came to for Anthropic in 2025.

Treat product-led usage as the land and plan retention separately. Anthropic's answer to its own exposure is a commit contract with a fixed price list, and a smaller vendor needs the same conversion step. When an account crosses a usage threshold, offer the committed rate before a rival offers a discount.

If you buy, the filing shows where your leverage sits. Usage without a commitment is the account Anthropic most needs to lock in and OpenAI most wants to win. Get the second lab's quote before you sign a minimum spend, and fix the rate for usage above the commitment. If your spend runs through a cloud marketplace, ask your cloud rep whether the lab's discount and your commitment drawdown stack. The answer often changes what the second quote is worth.

By Business of GTM