Half Through the Marketplace

5 October 2026. Anthropic's prospectus has not been made public; figures from it are as reported by Reuters on the dates stated in the text.

Interest disclosure: T-OpenAI and T-Kalshi are tokenized loan participation rights providing economic exposure linked to those companies' pre-IPO valuations, each issued through a dedicated issuing subsidiary. T-SpaceX, issued through its own dedicated issuing subsidiary, provides economic exposure linked to SpaceX; following the SpaceX listing, the investment underlying T-SpaceX is being divested. Redemption opens only once a Redemption Start Date is announced, and as of 5 October 2026 none has been. OpenAI competes with Anthropic. SpaceX's own prospectus records it as supplying compute to Anthropic and names Anthropic among its competitors, and on 14 August 2026 SpaceX acquired Anysphere, the company behind the coding tool Cursor. Reuters does not name Anthropic's two largest customers, and we do not know whether Cursor is one of them. No Tessera product references Anthropic's valuation. Tessera's interest in how Anthropic's listing is received does not run in one direction: a competitor's valuation sits on one side, and on the other a supplier that depends on Anthropic paying. Tessera's founder, and entities he controls, hold related exposure. Read what follows with that in mind.

On 28 September Reuters reported that two customers accounted for nearly a quarter of Anthropic's revenue in 2025. Asked about it by Inc., Chan Ahn, Tessera's founder, said the figure was more notable than the larger percentages at Nvidia or CoreWeave, where concentration still matters but a short customer list is at least the expected shape of a business selling capacity to a few very large buyers. The exception he named was the case in which Anthropic's two turned out to be cloud platforms reselling its models, and he offered that as the answer that would narrow the concern. The reporting that followed suggests it would widen it.

What Reuters Reported on 29 September

Anthropic's filing is still confidential, and a search of SEC EDGAR on 5 October found no public registration statement. Reuters, which has seen the filing, reported the following share of Anthropic's revenue sold through Amazon and Google:

• 2023: 11%
• 2024: 32%
• 2025: 47%, about $2.16 billion, through their cloud marketplaces

Reuters still does not name the two customers who each generated 12% of revenue in 2025, and this piece will not guess. It does report that the filing notes the cloud companies are also Anthropic's customers. Either way, on our reading, the larger concentration is the channel. Nearly half of last year's revenue arrived through two marketplaces, and the companies that own them are, by Reuters' account of the filing, also Anthropic's investors, its compute suppliers, its competitors and its customers. If either of the two 12% customers is one of them, the two concentrations fall on the same companies and add up to more.

Why a Channel Is a Different Risk

When a customer leaves, its spending goes with it. When a channel leaves, reprices or simply sells with less effort, what goes is the route by which many customers found Anthropic and paid it, and that can happen even where Anthropic holds the contract. On Reuters' account, the filing warns that the cloud providers gain visibility into Anthropic's pricing and commercial terms, which could influence their decisions on compute allocation and on how aggressively they sell its products. It also says that reliance on a few partners "creates complex dynamics that could give rise to conflicts of interest and adversely affect our access to compute."

The channel sits in the cash cycle as well. At the end of 2025 the platforms were responsible for collecting 60% of the $909 million that customers owed Anthropic, up from 42% a year earlier. That is a larger share than their share of sales. The filing warns that disputes or delays in that pipeline could hurt cash flow, even though Anthropic contracts with the customers directly.

The filing makes the opposite case too, openly. By offering Claude through the cloud platforms of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, Anthropic says it reaches their customers, accelerating "market penetration at a scale we believe would be difficult for any single organization to directly replicate." The reach is real, and so is the dependence. The filing describes both.

The August Question, Partly Answered

Tessera's piece of 28 August, The Money Goes Round, framed the issue this way: "The question is not whether the revenue exists. It is what share of it is independent of the capital that created it."

For the customers, this reporting does not answer it. Reuters does not describe who the marketplace buyers are, so the independence of Anthropic's end demand remains as open as it was in August. What the reporting does settle is the route the revenue takes. Amazon and Google have invested tens of billions of dollars in Anthropic and are, in Reuters' words, "critical suppliers of computing power". They carried nearly half of its 2025 sales, and at the end of 2025 they were responsible for collecting 60% of what customers owed it. Reuters calls the channel fees "one strand of an increasingly circular financial relationship". Whether the customers are independent, we still cannot say. The channel, on Reuters' account of the filing, is not.

Gross and Net

Reuters puts Anthropic's 2025 revenue at nearly $4.6 billion. Anthropic books the full value of marketplace contracts as revenue, on the basis that it sets the price and delivers the service, and records the platforms' cut as a marketing cost. On Reuters' analysis that cut came to roughly $351 million in 2025: about 16 cents of every marketplace dollar and, on our arithmetic, about 8% of total revenue.

Booking gross reflects a judgment about who is the principal in the sale. Anthropic told Reuters in June that it follows established accounting practice, and Reuters reported in the same month that OpenAI has told investors the approach inflates Anthropic's revenue. Tessera has an interest in that dispute through T-OpenAI and takes no side on the accounting. A buyer comparing Anthropic with a company that books net needs both numbers.

What the Public Filing Should Show

• The two largest customers: whether either of the 12% customers is a cloud platform.
• Channel terms: the marketplace share and the platforms' fee rate, by year and by platform, and the terms on which a platform can change either.
• Gross and net: revenue both gross and net of channel fees, side by side.
• Collections: how much of what the platforms collect is overdue at any point, and what happens to it in a dispute.
• 2026: whether the marketplace share has held into this year.

Reuters reports that revenue grew 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, and the channel is part of the reason. The point here is narrower than the growth: nearly half of last year's revenue ran through two of the three cloud companies whose incentives, the filing says on Reuters' account, "may not be fully aligned" with Anthropic's. The Money Goes Round also observed that "being right about the technology and being right about the security are different questions, answered by different documents." This is a question for the security's document, and the public filing will have to answer it.

Sources: Reuters, Echo Wang and Krystal Hu, 29 September 2026, on Anthropic's confidential IPO prospectus (syndicated as "Anthropic IPO prospectus lays bare deep dependence on Big Tech partners"), read in full via Global Banking & Finance Review on 5 October 2026, for the marketplace shares, the $2.16 billion, the receivables, the 12% customers, the platforms' roles, the distribution-fee analysis, the revenue-recognition treatment and OpenAI's criticism, and the quotations from the filing and from Reuters. Reuters, Echo Wang and Sabrina Valle, 29 September 2026, read via KFGO on 29 September 2026, for "may not be fully aligned". Reuters, Echo Wang, 28 September 2026, read via Yahoo Finance on 29 September 2026, for the two-customer figure and 2025 revenue. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., prospectus (Form 424B4), 12 June 2026, and Form 8-K, 14 August 2026, for the statements in the interest disclosure. SEC EDGAR full-text search, 5 October 2026, finding no public Anthropic registration statement. Tessera, "The Money Goes Round", 28 August 2026, as published at blog.tessera.pe, for the passages quoted. Chan Ahn's comments to Inc. in the week of 28 September 2026, as given. Figures are as of the dates given.

This is market commentary, not investment advice. It is not a recommendation to acquire, hold or redeem any Tessera product, or to take or avoid exposure to any company mentioned.

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