Anthropic 40% of ARR is sold by cloud vendors: $65 billion in annualized revenue is not that easy to earn

Comparative news, AI news, Anthropic's annualized revenue just reached $65 billion, and SemiAnalysis then split this revenue. According to its model estimates, more than 40% of ARR in the second quarter came from indirect channels such as AWS Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry, and Google's enterprise AI platform. What is worth paying attention to is how much profit these revenues can leave behind. In Bedrock, for example, Claude was sold by Anthropic. Anthropic will count the total amount of tokens sold into ARR, and then pay AWS for computing power and channel sharing. In other words, it's also a $1 ARR. If you sell it through a cloud platform, Anthropic will end up leaving less money than direct sales. So while $65 billion ARR isn't fake income, the revenue structure is clearly not that healthy. The higher the share of channels, the less direct equations between revenue growth and profit growth. If you only look at ARR, you might be overestimating the contribution of these revenues to Anthropic's final profit. Of course, there are benefits to the channel model. AWS, Microsoft, and Google already have a large number of enterprise customers and procurement contracts, and can directly cram Claude into existing cloud bills. Anthropic is now trading some of its profits for scale and customer acquisition efficiency.