Amazon set to be the biggest winner of Anthropic's IPO,
The AI company's S-1 shows venture backers holding small stakes, while Amazon's convertible notes have grown in value to tens of billions of dollars.
Amazon is likely the single largest financial beneficiary of Anthropic's planned stock market listing, according to a TechCrunch analysis of the AI company's S-1 filing. This story rests on that single report.
According to the S-1, Amazon holds convertible notes with $6.2 billion in principal outstanding as of June 30, TechCrunch reported. That is Anthropic's entire debt load. The notes are a type of debt that converts into shares upon an IPO or sale. Amazon's own filings valued its note holdings at $97.9 billion as of June 30, according to TechCrunch.
Amazon also invested $10 billion in nonvoting preferred stock in the second quarter, putting $5 billion into each of Anthropic's last two funding rounds, TechCrunch reported, citing Amazon's quarterly report. Combined with $8 billion invested in the notes from 2023 through 2025, that brings Amazon's total investment to about $18 billion.
Venture firms including Menlo Ventures, Sequoia, Sound Ventures and Spark Capital are expected to make billions. But according to the S-1, none of them owns 5%, the threshold for appearing in the principal stockholders' table. TechCrunch called that highly unusual. Citing Bloomberg figures, it reported that at Anthropic's $965 billion private valuation, Menlo's roughly $14 billion position is only about 1.5% of the company.
The filing matters because it shows how much of Anthropic's value has flowed to companies that are also its business partners. As the notes grew in value, Anthropic had to record the change on its books. That line totaled $72.4 billion for the first half of 2026, a non-cash charge, TechCrunch reported.
Amazon will also keep earning revenue from Anthropic, which has committed to spend at least $110 billion on AWS over the next 10 years. Google has secured at least $114 billion in cloud commitments from Anthropic through 2033, according to TechCrunch. The S-1 warns that some cloud providers also build rival AI models and may not always want the same things Anthropic does.
Several questions remain open. Amazon's notes could convert into as many as 1.84 billion shares, but a cap limits Amazon to 12% of Anthropic's "partially diluted" share count. Amazon can waive that cap. Notes that cannot convert will stay outstanding and convert in later quarters, subject to the same limit. The report does not say whether Amazon plans to waive it.
Google's current stake is also uncertain. It held about 14% of Anthropic as of early last year, according to court filings reported by The New York Times, and invested $10 billion more in April, TechCrunch reported. PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes told TechCrunch he estimates Google's stake is now closer to 5.6%, after later funding rounds likely diluted it.
The report does not give a date or share price for the listing.
