Amazon reported $53.4 billion in non-operating pre-tax other income for the second quarter, primarily from its investment in Anthropic, according to Business Insider's report on the July 30th results. The figure gives Amazon a paper windfall several times larger than the $13 billion it has invested in the AI lab so far.
The gain tracks the rapid appreciation of the company built by siblings Dario Amodei (@DarioAmodei) and Daniela Amodei. On May 28th, Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion post-money valuation, more than doubling the $380 billion valuation attached to its Series G financing in February.
Amazon's earnings therefore contain two distinct Anthropic returns. The first is a mark on its private securities. The second is the commercial value of having one of the world's largest buyers of AI infrastructure committed to AWS and Amazon's Trainium chips.
That distinction matters because the $53.4 billion sits outside Amazon's operating results. It is an accounting revaluation rather than revenue from selling cloud capacity, advertising or consumer goods, and it does not represent $53.4 billion of cash arriving at Amazon. Amazon's underlying operations were strong during the quarter: net sales rose 20% to $200.6 billion, while AWS growth accelerated, according to the Associated Press.
A private financing round moved Amazon's earnings
Amazon's filings describe its Anthropic securities as private-company investments that are carried at cost and adjusted when observable transactions establish a new price or when an impairment occurs. Anthropic's May financing supplied a new market price for those securities, allowing Amazon to recognize the increase through other income.
The second-quarter adjustment follows a $16.8 billion pre-tax Anthropic gain that Amazon recorded in the first quarter. In its March 31st quarterly filing, Amazon said private-company holdings primarily related to nonvoting Anthropic preferred stock and OpenAI preferred stock had a carrying value of $48.1 billion, up from $16.2 billion at the end of 2025.
Amazon had invested $8 billion in Anthropic through the end of 2025. It added another $5 billion in April, bringing its invested capital to $13 billion, and established a facility that could provide Anthropic with as much as $20 billion more. The financing expires 30 months after a qualifying liquidity event, including an IPO or direct listing, according to the filing.
Anthropic said the $5 billion April investment formed part of its Series H round. Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital led the financing, with Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, ICONIQ and XN serving as co-leads. The breadth of the group gave Amazon an external pricing event for its holding rather than a valuation determined solely through a bilateral deal with Anthropic.
The resulting gain can move in either direction. A lower-priced financing, impairment or public-market decline could force Amazon to reduce the carrying value. The second-quarter figure consequently says more about the price investors paid for Anthropic securities in May than about the amount of profit Amazon generated from its regular business during the quarter.
Amodei made cloud infrastructure part of the financing strategy
Amodei came to Anthropic after serving as OpenAI's vice president of research, where he led work on GPT-2 and GPT-3 as well as AI safety research. He previously worked at Google Brain and earned a physics doctorate from Princeton after studying at Stanford, according to his Hertz Foundation biography.
He and Daniela Amodei founded Anthropic in 2021 with a group of former OpenAI researchers. Anthropic's first institutional financing announcement framed the lab around building AI systems that were steerable, interpretable and reliable. Claude has since turned that research program into a commercial product spanning consumer subscriptions, enterprise deployments and developer tools.
The cost of competing at the frontier has made Amodei's cloud relationships inseparable from Anthropic's fundraising. Under an expanded agreement announced on April 20th, Anthropic committed more than $100 billion over 10 years to AWS technologies and secured up to five gigawatts of capacity for training and running Claude. Anthropic said it was already using more than one million Trainium2 chips and that more than 100,000 customers ran Claude through Amazon Bedrock.
The arrangement creates a circular commercial structure. Amazon supplies capital to Anthropic. Anthropic uses part of its financing to buy cloud infrastructure from Amazon. New investors raise Anthropic's valuation, producing accounting gains for Amazon. The relationship gives Amazon exposure to Claude's private-market appreciation while strengthening demand for AWS and Trainium.
Anthropic said its annualized revenue run rate crossed $47 billion in May, up from the more than $30 billion it reported in April. Those figures are company-supplied run rates rather than audited annual revenue, and the May financing announcement did not provide profitability or cash-flow figures. Anthropic said the new capital would fund compute, product expansion, safety work and interpretability research.
Amodei has continued to pair that commercial expansion with demands for tighter oversight of frontier models. RuntimeWire reported in June that he had proposed aviation-style testing and deployment controls for advanced AI systems, including audits and possible holds on releases. That policy posture will face greater investor scrutiny as Anthropic moves toward public ownership.
An IPO would replace financing marks with a public price
On June 1st, Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement for a proposed initial public offering. Anthropic has not set the number of shares, an offering price or a listing date.
A completed IPO would give Amazon a continuously observable market price for at least part of its Anthropic position and could eventually create a path to liquidity. It would also expose Anthropic's revenue composition, losses, compute obligations and investor rights in a public prospectus, offering a clearer test of the $965 billion private valuation that produced Amazon's latest gain.
Until then, Amazon's $53.4 billion figure remains a private-market mark embedded in public-company earnings. Its economic value rests on Anthropic sustaining the financing price, while its strategic value rests on Amodei continuing to direct a substantial share of Anthropic's infrastructure spending toward Amazon.