Business and economy·October 26, 2026, 18:37

Anthropic's sales bill has ballooned, driven by fees to partners

AI-generated from the sources listed, with automated source checks.

Anthropic's costs for sales, marketing and partners were $3.17 billion in the first half of 2026. According to Digiday, fees to cloud companies and channel partners accounted for $2.7 billion of the increase.

Anthropic, the company behind the AI assistant Claude, is spending far more money on selling its products than before. That is according to the company's IPO prospectus, whose figures are reported by the outlets Digiday and Tech Insider.

According to Digiday, costs for sales, marketing and partnerships were $3.17 billion in the first half of 2026. Tech Insider reports that total costs for sales, marketing and partners rose from about $120 million to about $3.2 billion.

Fees to cloud companies and partners

The largest part of the increase comes from fees to cloud companies and channel partners, meaning companies that resell Claude to their own customers. According to Digiday, those fees accounted for $2.7 billion of the increase in costs. Tech Insider similarly reports that payments to channel partners rose by $2.7 billion in the first half of 2026.

It is not clear, however, how large a share of the $3.17 billion the fees make up in total. Nor does it show how much of the amount goes to the big cloud providers and how much goes to other partners.

Figures from Tech Insider show that Google, Amazon and Microsoft accounted for 48 percent of Anthropic's revenue in the first half of 2026 through their cloud marketplaces. A cloud marketplace is a kind of web shop where companies can buy software and services through the cloud provider they already use.

Revenue has grown sharply

At the same time, revenue has surged. According to Digiday, it was $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, compared with $1.2 billion in the same period of 2025.

More money for advertising

Marketing and advertising costs have also risen. According to Digiday, they were $273 million higher than in the first half of 2025. Advertising spending was $33 million in 2024 and $147 million in 2025. The prospectus attributes the 2025 increase to higher spending on media and PR in connection with product launches.

Anthropic expects advertising spending to rise as the market becomes more competitive.

The 2026 figures cover six months and are not a full-year financial statement. The figures come from outlets reporting on the prospectus, and Tech Insider itself cites Bloomberg as its source.