VCs will make billions on Anthropic’s IPO, but Amazon is set to make much (much) more
There is something almost absurd about a group of venture firms walking away from Anthropic's IPO with billions of dollars while holding stakes so small they barely register in percentage terms. Menlo and Sequoia will do just fine, but the filing basically confirms what everyone suspected: this company was never really built for traditional VC math. A $965 billion valuation makes every early investor a rounding error.
Amazon, meanwhile, structured itself into a position that makes the VCs look like they were playing a different game entirely. That $18 billion in convertible notes now sitting at nearly $98 billion on the books is the kind of return that reshapes an entire portfolio. And then there's the $110 billion in AWS commitments. Amazon gets paid as an investor and as an infrastructure landlord, which is the best deal in the whole arrangement. They collect on the upside whether Anthropic succeeds as a product or simply keeps buying compute.
The S-1's caution about cloud partners building rival models is worth sitting with. Amazon and Anthropic are locked together right now because each needs what the other has. But Anthropic's own filing acknowledges that Amazon could one day decide its homegrown models are good enough. That's the risk baked into every symbiotic relationship in this industry, no matter how many billions are on the table.