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BT Ben Thompson Ben Thompson Writes Stratechery, a subscription newsletter analyzing the business strategy behind tech and media companies, and has built a reputation for framing how platfo...

“About 50% of their revenue is coming from the big three via those services. So it's coming through AWS, coming through Azure, coming through Google. And it is confirmed that they're doing kind of sketchy accounting, depends how you want to define it, which is if you pay Amazon $100, that … Anthropic is recording that $100 as revenue. Anthropic revenue. And then in reality, like 30, a third of that or so depends, it sort of varies. I think people were saying about 37% goes to the provider, the platform provider, the AWS, the Azure, the Google.”

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

“About 50% of their revenue is coming from the big three via those services. So it's coming through AWS, coming through Azure, coming through Google. And it is confirmed that they're doing kind of sketchy accounting, depends how you want to define it, which is if you pay Amazon $100, that … Anthropic is recording that $100 as revenue. Anthropic revenue. And then in reality, like 30, a third of that or so depends, it sort of varies. I think people were saying about 37% goes to the provider, the platform provider, the AWS, the Azure, the Google.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson

Context

Thompson is going through details from a 400-plus page S-1 filing and says Anthropic's business looks strong overall. Here he explains that about half of Anthropic's revenue comes through the three big cloud platforms. He describes how Anthropic records the full payment as revenue even though roughly a third goes to the platform.

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Transcript

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson Around 12:58 into the episode
Ben Thompson

…on all the clouds. Yeah. Like they, they, you know, the, they're, they're always on Amazon and then Google, and now they're on Microsoft. And that was a huge, I think that's very underrated in why they took over the enterprise under OpenAI's nose. OpenAI was stuck on Microsoft. Like, and so what

Andrew Sharp

advantage did that give Anthropic with enterprises?

Ben Thompson

Because if you have all your data on AWS, you would rather use the service on AWS. And like, so, so there's another thing. Sorry, there's, it's an S1. It's like, I've seen 400 plus pages. That's right. So a lot of threads. So about 50% of their revenue is coming from the big three via those services. So it's coming through AWS, coming through Azure, coming through Google. And it is confirmed that they're doing kind of sketchy accounting, depends how you want to define it, which is if you pay Amazon $100, that their Anthropic is recording that $100 as revenue. Anthropic revenue. And then in reality, like 30, a third of that or so depends, it sort of varies. I think people were saying about 37% goes to the provider, the platform provider, the AWS, the Azure, the Google. So they are putting that 30% into sales and marketing.

Andrew Sharp

I was wondering what the sales and marketing costs are. So that's part of it. Okay.

Ben Thompson

A little bit of BS accounting, in my opinion. So for two factors. Number one, I think it's fair to argue that they should not be recognized at 30% at all. They should only be recognizing the portion that is going to them. And then their revenues would be lower.

Andrew Sharp

Yeah.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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