Amazon and Google have poured more money into Anthropic than into any other AI startup. Neither one controls it. The company that builds Claude answers to a small independent trust, and no one outside a private cap table can buy a share.
You Cannot Buy Anthropic Directly
Start with the part most searches get wrong. Anthropic is private. There is no ticker, no public float, and no filed plan to go public as of early June. Every share is held by founders, employees, and the investors who funded the company through eight private rounds.
That matters because the demand to own a piece of Anthropic is real and growing. The company is now reported to carry a higher valuation than OpenAI, after a Series H round that reportedly raised about $65 billion at a post-money value near $965 billion. The only way onto that cap table is a private allocation. For everyone else, exposure runs through the public companies that already own a slice.
Two Founders and a Trust That Sits Above Them
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, the chief executive, and his sister Daniela Amodei, the president. They left OpenAI with roughly a dozen other researchers and built the company around a single argument: that AI safety should be written into the corporate structure, not bolted on later.
So they did something unusual. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, which legally requires its directors to weigh a public mission alongside shareholder returns. On top of that sits the Long-Term Benefit Trust, a body of five financially disinterested members who hold a special class of stock. The trust elects and removes a portion of the board that grows over time, and it is structured to control a majority of board seats within a few years of its creation.
Read that again. The people who can hire and fire most of Anthropic's directors are not its largest investors. They are trustees with no financial stake in the outcome. Amazon and Google wrote the biggest checks and still cannot steer the board.
Amazon Paid the Most and Controls the Least
Amazon is the single largest investor. It originally committed roughly $8 billion across several rounds and in April announced up to $25 billion more, bringing its potential total above $30 billion. Anthropic runs much of its training and inference on Amazon Web Services and has pledged more than $100 billion in AWS spending over the next decade. The relationship is deep on the technical side and deliberately limited on the governance side. Amazon does not hold a board seat that gives it control over strategy.
The financial return on the earlier rounds has been enormous on paper. Amazon's stake is now reported to be worth more than $70 billion, multiple times the roughly $8 billion initially deployed. Amazon trades near a $2.8 trillion market cap, pays no dividend, and still derives most of its operating profit from AWS, the same cloud arm that hosts Anthropic. The Anthropic position sits on top of that as a separate, large, and volatile asset.
Google's Stake Is Bigger Than It Looks
Alphabet is the other heavyweight. Google has invested billions in Anthropic and signed a major cloud deal to supply it with computing power, and its holding has been widely reported at around 14% of the company. That makes Alphabet one of the largest economic owners of Anthropic outside the founders, even though it, too, lacks board control.
Alphabet carries a market cap above $4.5 trillion and pays a small dividend, recently $0.84 a share annually, a yield well under half a percent. The Anthropic stake is a rounding error against that size on any given day, until the value gets marked up. Then it stops being a rounding error.
Why Anthropic Now Moves Amazon and Alphabet Earnings
Here is the part that should interest anyone holding these two stocks. When Anthropic's valuation jumps in a new round, Amazon and Alphabet revalue their stakes, and that gain flows through reported earnings.
In the first quarter of 2026, roughly $28.7 billion of Alphabet's record $62.6 billion profit came from updating the value of equity it owns in private companies, primarily Anthropic. Amazon reported a pre-tax gain near $16.8 billion tied to the same Anthropic markup. Two of the most valuable companies on earth booked a meaningful slice of one quarter's profit from a private startup neither one controls. That cuts both ways. Paper gains can become paper losses if the next AI funding round prices lower or stalls. An investor buying Microsoft for OpenAI exposure or Amazon and Alphabet for Anthropic exposure is taking on the swings of private AI valuations inside an otherwise diversified business. Microsoft, near a $3.4 trillion market cap, runs the same playbook through its OpenAI position. We broke down that structure in our look at who owns OpenAI.
The Newer Money Behind the Latest Round
The most recent round widened the investor base well beyond the two cloud giants. It was reportedly led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, and it pulled in strategic money from the memory-chip makers that supply the hardware AI models run on.
Micron was among them, a public name that has ridden the same AI memory demand to a market cap above $1.1 trillion. Salesforce, through its venture arm, is an earlier backer and trades near a $170 billion market cap. Menlo Ventures, Spark Capital, Lightspeed, ICONIQ, and Fidelity round out a cap table that now spans cloud providers, chipmakers, crossover funds, and sovereign-linked capital.
How to Get Exposure Without Owning Anthropic
For a public-market investor, there is no clean proxy. Buying Amazon or Alphabet gives indirect, partial exposure to Anthropic, but each stake is a small fraction of a sprawling business with its own drivers, from advertising to retail to cloud margins. The Anthropic upside is real, and it is diluted by everything else those companies do.
Anyone treating Amazon or Alphabet as an Anthropic trade should size it that way. The stake adds optionality and earnings volatility, not a pure bet. And because Anthropic is private, there is no daily price to track, only periodic markups that land in quarterly reports.
What Comes Next
The next funding round, or the first credible move toward an IPO, will be the catalyst to watch. A higher valuation lifts the marks on Amazon's and Alphabet's balance sheets and feeds another earnings bump. A flat or down round does the reverse. Until shares trade publicly, the cleanest read on Anthropic's value will keep showing up where most investors are not looking, buried in the footnotes of two trillion-dollar companies.
