Amazon stands to capture far more value from Anthropic's impending IPO than any venture capital firm, despite VCs backing the AI company in its early stages.
Menlo Ventures, Sequoia, Sound Ventures, and Spark Capital collectively hold stakes worth billions, yet none owns the 5% threshold required for inclusion in Anthropic's principal stockholders table. This reflects Anthropic's $965 billion private valuation. At that size, a 1% stake equals nearly $10 billion. Menlo's roughly $14 billion position represents only about 1.5% of the company.
Amazon structured its investment differently and vastly larger. The cloud provider committed up to $4 billion to Anthropic in 2023, then deployed billions more. Rather than taking equity upfront, Amazon held much of its investment as convertible notes, debt that converts to shares upon an IPO.
According to Anthropic's S-1 filing, Amazon holds convertible notes with $6.2 billion in principal outstanding as of June 30. Amazon's own filings valued these notes at $97.9 billion as of the same date. The notes could convert into as many as 1.84 billion shares, though a cap limits Amazon to 12% of Anthropic's partially diluted share count.
Amazon also invested $10 billion in nonvoting preferred stock in the second quarter, split across Anthropic's last two funding rounds at $5 billion each. Combined with $8 billion invested in convertible notes from 2023 through 2025, Amazon's total investment reached approximately $18 billion.
Beyond equity gains, Amazon will continue earning revenue from Anthropic. The AI company committed to spend at least $110 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next 10 years.
Google holds roughly 8% of Anthropic following dilution from recent funding rounds, down from about 14% early last year. Google invested $10 billion in April and secured at least $114 billion in cloud commitments from Anthropic through 2033.
Anthropic's S-1 notes that cloud providers including Amazon and Google build rival AI models, raising questions about potential conflicts of interest.