Many investors are positioned to reap huge rewards when Anthropic lists on the market. Venture firms such as Menlo Ventures, Sequoia, Sound Ventures and Spark Capital are expected to see returns measured in billions of dollars. Yet the company’s S‑1 filing shows that none of these firms own enough shares to appear on the principal stockholders list, which requires a 5 percent holding. In most tech IPOs, the lead venture backers own double‑digit percentages of the company they helped build. Anthropic’s massive size changes the math. With a private valuation of $965 billion, a 1 percent stake is worth nearly $10 billion, so Menlo’s roughly $14 billion position translates to only about 1.5 percent of the firm, according to Bloomberg.
Although the venture firms lack large percentage stakes, Anthropic has sold sizable blocks to strategic partners that also serve as its customers. Amazon is likely to be the single biggest financial beneficiary of the offering. The cloud giant first committed up to $4 billion to Anthropic in 2023 and has since added billions more. Rather than taking equity outright, Amazon structured most of its investment as convertible notes, a form of debt that turns into shares at an IPO or sale. The S‑1 indicates that Amazon held convertible notes with $6.2 billion of principal outstanding as of June 30, which represents Anthropic’s entire debt load. As the company’s valuation rose in successive funding rounds, the potential shares linked to those notes became far more valuable. Amazon’s own filings valued its note holdings at $97.9 billion at the end of June. The rising fair‑value of the notes forced Anthropic to record a non‑cash charge of $72.4 billion on its income statement for the first half of 2026 under “change in fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities, and SAFEs.”
The notes could convert into as many as 1.84 billion shares, though a cap limits Amazon to 12 percent of Anthropic’s partially diluted share count, a measure that includes shares not yet issued such as stock options. Amazon can waive the cap, and any notes that do not convert now will remain outstanding and may convert in later quarters under the same limitation. The convertible notes are only part of Amazon’s exposure. In the second quarter, Amazon invested $10 billion in non‑voting preferred stock, according to its quarterly report for the period ending June 30. That investment came from $5 billion placed in each of Anthropic’s two most recent funding rounds. Adding the $8 billion Amazon put into convertible notes from 2023 through 2025, its total commitment to Anthropic approaches $18 billion.
Beyond equity upside, Amazon will continue to earn substantial revenue from the partnership, as Anthropic has pledged to spend at least $110 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next decade. Google is also positioned for a sizable windfall from both the listing and its cloud agreements with Anthropic. Court filings reported by The New York Times showed Google held roughly 14 percent of Anthropic early last year and has added to that stake, including a $10 billion infusion in April. PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes estimates that after dilution in later funding rounds, Google’s stake now sits closer to 8 percent. The search giant has also secured at least $114 billion in cloud commitments from Anthropic through 2033.
While venture capital firms stand to collect massive paydays, the S‑1 makes clear that the biggest winners of Anthropic’s IPO are likely to be the tech giants that backed the company early and now supply much of the computing power it consumes. The filing also cautions that some of those cloud providers are building competing AI models and may not always share Anthropic’s priorities.