While the venture firms may lack sizable percentage stakes, Anthropic sold large stakes to strategic partners, companies that are also its business partners. Indeed, Amazon is likely the single largest financial beneficiary of the IPO.
As the value of Amazon’s convertible notes surged, Anthropic had to record the growing value of what it owes on its books. It reported the adjustments on its income statement under “change in fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities, and SAFEs,” a line that totaled $72.4 billion for the first half of 2026. The charge is non-cash, meaning no money left the company.
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% 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. Notes that can’t convert will stay outstanding and convert in later quarters, subject to the same limit.
But the notes are only part of Amazon’s holdings. It further invested $10 billion in nonvoting preferred stock (a type of equity), in the second quarter, according to Amazon’s quarterly report for the period ended June 30. Amazon did this by investing $5 billion in each of Anthropic’s last two funding rounds. Combined with the $8 billion it invested in the notes from 2023 through 2025, that brings Amazon’s total investment to about $18 billion.
Beyond its stock gains, Amazon will also continue to earn significant revenue from Anthropic, which has committed to spend at least $110 billion on AWS over the next 10 years.
While VCs set for massive paydays have little reason to complain, the S-1 makes it clear that the biggest winners of Anthropic’s IPO may well be tech giants like Amazon, which backed a would-be rival early on and now sell it much of the computing power it runs on.
The S-1 itself warns that some of those cloud providers also build rival AI models and that they may not always want the same things that Anthropic does.
Marina Temkin is a venture capital and startups reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she wrote about VC for PitchBook and Venture Capital Journal. Earlier in her career, Marina was a financial analyst and earned a CFA charterholder designation.