Exclusive: Here's How Much Anthropic Spends on AWS

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0:31And big shout out to my friends at Hyundai for making this possible. Had a blast cruising around festival weekend in the all new Palisade Hybrid. Living sustainably can feel overwhelming. Most people don't have time to overhaul their whole life. But that's where Cleanomic comes in. Cleanomic isn't about perfection. It's about progress. It's about those small switches that add up like trading plastic bags for compostable ones. Or ditching toxic detergent jugs for a slim sleeve of laundry sheets. If you're ready to make small switches with a big impact, go to Cleanomic.com and check out their curated bundles.

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2:14Hello and welcome to a special exclusive episode of Better Offline. I'm your host Ed Zitron.

2:30As a result of discussions with sources and documents viewed of the amounts billed on Amazon Web Services, I am, for the first time in history, able to disclose how much AI firms are spending on AWS, specifically Anthropic, an AI coding company Cursor, its largest customer for API services. I can exclusively reveal today how much Anthropic spent on AWS for the years 2024 and from the beginning of 2025 through the end of September 2025. And from what I can see, their compute spend may vastly exceed what has previously been reported. Furthermore, I can confirm that through the end of September 2025, Anthropic has spent around 100 % of their revenue in 2025 on Amazon Web Services, spending$2.66 billion on compute on an estimated$2.55 billion in revenue.

3:15Go to the newsletter. I source the whole goddamn thing. and if I'm honest, this piece is the culmination of several months of articles about how Anthropic's business tactics have maybe turned the screws on their biggest customer. I can exclusively reveal today, as well as many other numbers in the newsletter, that Cursor's Amazon Web Services bills doubled from$6.2 million in May 2025 to$12.6 million in June 2025, and have stayed inflated since Anthropic increased the costs with the launch of priority service tiers, an aggressive rent-seeking measure. I need to be clear, I cannot 100 % guarantee that's what did it I'm going to hedge my bets very hard on that But it certainly bloody well seems that way It's my gut instinct, I'm not going to say it declaratively But I'm going to show you why I believe this And I admit I struggled with how to turn this into an episode Because the newsletter, which is on my free feed Is a series of numbers and analyses that if I just read them aloud would sound extremely dull And at times be quite hard to follow It's not something that naturally plays well for radio So instead of giving you the audible version I'm going to give you the cliff notes and speak to a degree of vindication I feel on reading these costs.

4:19So let's start with a number,$1.225 billion. That's how much Anthropic spent on Amazon Web Services in the third quarter of 2025. They spent$829.7 million in Q2 2025 and$610 million in Q1 2025. Oh, and one other number, they spent$1.35 billion on AWS in 2024. So yeah, just in another way, talking of their 2025 numbers, Anthropic's spend on AWS doubled over the course of three quarters. Now, a little backstory about Anthropic that's necessary to understand this fully. Anthropic was originally invested in by both Google and Amazon. According to the New York Times, Google owns around 14 % of the company.

5:00Analysts estimate Amazon owns somewhere between 15 % and 18%, and both have, in not so many words, said that they're the main or primary compute partner for Anthropic. It's unclear how much Anthropic spends on Google Cloud, but Semi-Analysis believes they're a big client, and that's about as much detail as I can get from anywhere I've really looked. In any case, Anthropic is spending effectively every dollar they make on Amazon Web Services, and Amazon appears to be booking this as revenue, though I can't directly confirm that. Though I do know these numbers are cash, they're after credits. Though in the recent months, Anthropics lowered the amount of revenue they're spending on it to 86.2 % in Q3 2025, which is an improvement from Q2 2025, where they spent 106 % of their revenue, and Q1, where they spent 175 % of what they made on Amazon Web Services.

5:51It's quite horrifying when you say it out loud. Now, if you're thinking that because these numbers are quite close that this might suggest that Anthropics' costs are improving, think again. Anthropics' Amazon Web Services costs have a habit of massively spiking. For example, their AWS bill led from$383.7 million in August 2025 to$518.9 million in September 2025. That's$135 million goddamn dollars, and my hunch is it's because they have a massive problem where clawed code users are each costing them thousands of dollars despite only paying$100 or$200 a month. There's also the nasty matter of Google Cloud.

6:29Anthropics Amazon Web Services bill is$2.66 billion from January through the end of September, as I said. And that is pretty close to$2.55 billion in revenue. But if Anthropics' spend on Google Cloud was only 25 % of what they spent on AWS, its compute costs would jump to$3.33 billion through the end of September, way more than it brings in. If it's half of what they spent on Amazon Web Services, this becomes a$3.99 billion compute bill. And if they spend the same amount, the bill becomes$5.3 billion. And again, that's just through the end of September. Another note. Now, cursor spend on Amazon web services is comparatively small, but includes some spend on Anthropix models, because Amazon is allowed to sell them.

7:09And I believe that the reason that they do this, because they do directly pay Anthropix, like they actually send money directly to them, is because Amazon offers significant discounts in some cases for running models through their service. I think it's their bedrock service. And my source confirmed that this was the case, though I could not get granular data on what exactly cursor spend was on Amazon. Like, I can't say, oh, they use this model or that model. Now, Cursor spends most of their compute money directly with Anthropic, as well as every other model developer whose models they use. AWS is a small piece of the puzzle.

7:41And while small, its spending data provides evidence of how much this shit actually costs. Though I also concede that some of the money Cursor spends with AWS likely goes to the non-AI part of the business, like file hosting and other tech infrastructure. Nevertheless, the timing of the massive jumps in Cursor's AWS bill, from$6.2 million in May to$12.6 million in June, directly correlate with the massive changes made to their product, increasing the costs on any users that wanted to use Cursor in the way they had in the past by making them face the actual costs of serving models on a per-million token basis.

8:13I've written about this a lot, by the way. It's hard to describe in detail because it's going to take forever, but around mid-June, Cursor had to change everything because mysteriously they had to stop spending so much money with their customers. Their customers were burning a hole in their pocket, and I think we can kind of see why. Cursor's costs have also never come down, spiking to a high of$15.5 million in June, dropping to a still high$9.6 million in August, only to spike again to$12.9 million in September. Though I cannot declaratively state that this is exactly what happened, Cursor's costs doubled immediately following the addition of Anthropic service tiers in late May 2025, which require an upfront commitment of token spend and token throughput.

8:58And when Cursor announced the launch of their$200 a month Ultra plan amidst massive product changes, they cited how it was, and I quote, made possible by multi-year partnerships from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and XAI, and that their support was instrumental in offering this volume of compute at a predictable price.

9:23Hey, it's Bobby from The Bobby Bone Show. I had an incredible time at this year's iHeartRadio Music Festival, and even got the chance to hang out with Diplo and Bailey Zimmerman while I was there. Check this out. So how did Ashes come together, Diplo? Well, I kind of briefly met Bailey, I think at Morgan's show, one of them. And I think he's just a guy in Nashville. He's cool as hell. And I had a new kind of sound I wanted to do. And I think he's the one guy that could carry it. And I came to his house. I had a show. I pulled up real quick. He was about to leave on tour. You're about to jump in your tour bus.

9:55And we had like three hours, play the record for him. We kind of like got a scratch. And then he handled it on his own on the road. Yeah. Yeah, it was really cool. He really just like randomly showed up to my house. I'm like, oh, hey, Diplo, what are you doing? He's like, I have a song that I want to show you. And I was like, OK. And then now we're here playing it live. You can listen to the full episode out now wherever you get your podcasts. And big shout out to my friends at Hyundai for making this possible. At a blast, cruising around festival weekend in the all new Palisade Hybrid. Living sustainably can feel overwhelming.

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12:12Now, really, I'm being as fair as I can. Another factor might be that the new Claude 4 models were significantly more expensive. It's entirely possible that all of these things are true. I just want to make sure I cover my bases, because I do not know for sure. But the timing, the timing, man. And another thing. You know what Anthropic also launched a week before service tiers? A competing product to Cursor called Claude Code. One that they could run with as little restraint as they'd like to drain as many monthly customers away from Cursor, who is also their largest customer buying Anthropic models through their API.

12:47Real fucking mystery, right? If it quacks like a duck, wears a t-shirt that says duck, and Claude tells you, you're absolutely right. that's a duck. When you upload a picture of it, it's probably a fucking duck, but I obviously can't say for sure. I need to be explicit here with what happened, though. Anthropic supplied access to their models to a company, Cursor, and then released a product, Claude Code, that did exactly the same thing as that company, Cursor, turning it both into a customer and a competitor, in the process creating a massive conflict of interest, as not only did Anthropic have an incentive for that customer or competitor to fail, though they also needed their compute revenue, which is kind of a bugger.

13:23Anthropic also had the means to make this failure happen in the most painful and expensive way possible by worsening the terms in which that competitor required the compute it needed to function. Could be a coincidence, I guess. And when I say compute, I mean tokens. I'm reading a script, okay? Anyway, I'm not going to turn this into a massive sprawling episode about this company. I wanted to give you the raw information so you can go and read the detailed analysis I did. It's free, by the way, don't worry. But now I want to talk about how all this made me feel, because that's what makes this show unique and I think is the appropriate way of coming at this.

13:58I'm going to be honest, I find what it looks like, and I'm hedging my bets again, Anthropic did to Cursor truly disgusting. Cursor hit$500 million in annualized revenue in the same month that they then saw their costs double, dramatically reducing the value of their subscription product at the apex of their success. Yes, Cursor is an unsustainable AI company, I know, and like all of these companies has no path to profitability. Anthropic should have always charged sustainable rates, even if it meant that it wasn't possible to build a big company based on their models. Sadly, we don't live in that universe.

14:32And while you could make the case that startups like Uber didn't at first charge sustainable rates, I'd argue that the reason why its initial rates weren't successful was because of the steep upfront cost of customer acquisition, which is a problem that could be solved through the lifetime of the customer, and Uber had the means to gradually ratchet up the costs of rides or, more shittily, reduce the cut that they pay to drivers in a way that wouldn't be immediately painful. Furthermore, Uber never had a fuel problem. What Anthropic has is a fuel problem. They have a compute problem for the amount that they're paying to run their goddamn services.

15:01Cursor is also Anthropic's largest customer, and the timing of priority tiers to coincide at the moment when they were growing fastest is a suspicious and potentially disgraceful move. While you could describe it as a necessary step in the direction of sustainability, that plausible excuse is undercut by the overall timing of the move. One cannot ignore how close the launch of these tiers were to the launch of Anthropik's clawed code, a product that lacks Cursor's flashy front-end but performs similar functions, all subsidized by Anthropik's massive hordes of venture capital and its chummy relationships with hyperscalers like Amazon and Google.

15:34The thing is, even with these moves, Anthropic still spent$1.04 on Amazon Web Services for every dollar they made through the end of September 2025, and that's for just 2025, by the way. Their costs increased linearly with their revenue, and while they've improved when they spent a remarkable 227 % of their revenue on AWS in January, they still spent 88.9 % of it on AWS in September. Now, if you're worried hearing how close these numbers before, like I said, means they're somehow approaching profitability, good lord no i'm repeating myself i realize but i really need you to come away with this with reality in your brain these digital mr beans very likely spend comparable sums on google cloud unlikely another billion or two on salaries data and i don't know that 1.5 billion dollar settlement with all the authors that they just agreed to this company absolutely fucking sucks i don't care if you like claude sonnet or claude opus i don't give a fuck claude opus and claude sonnet are not worth burning billions of dollars a year in cloud costs fueling an environmentally destructive, plagiarism-charged pseudo-company that would roll over and die within months if it didn't constantly get fed billions of dollars a year.

16:39What are you going to tell me? They're going to turn this ship around? They're going to make some sort of autonomous AI coder? You know that's bullshit. Every goddamn one of you boosters knows that total bullshit. I'm sure Sonnet 4.5 is somewhat better than Sonnet 4, but what does that actually mean? Anthropic raised$20 billion this year. Do we give them more next year? I've heard reports that they're actually targeting$20 billion in annualized revenue, so$1.67 billion a month in revenue by the end of next year. It's an absolute fucking joke, but the only thing funnier than that joke is that it will likely cost them$25 billion to make that fictional money.

17:16And where, pray tell, is that coming from? And why? Why? What is so remarkable about this company that gives them a free pass to earn$2.66 billion dollars in aws in fucking nine months i'm not talking about your cynical oh amazon is booking his revenue crony capitalism's here answer i'm not i'm not i'm talking about the scientific or technological reasoning for keeping anthropic alive and yes i feel exactly the same way about open ai what possible achievement does anthropic have that warrants this needless endless sprawling financial destruction why are we rewarding a company with bad business practices for making a product that loses more money, the more money it makes.

17:55I'll even try and see this through the eyes of an AI booster. Damn, all I'm seeing is blue and yellow. Anyway, and even from here, the only reason to keep Anthropic alive is because you see these companies as sports teams. You see Dario Amadei as the equivalent of Dan Campbell or Greg Popovich. You root for them and their causes because you think that if they win, you as a fan will be rewarded. You don't think too hard about what it is that Claude Sonnet or Claude Opus do, and you find enough ways that this is somewhat kind of useful to you, and you use those reasons to justify the proliferation of a wasteful and destructive technology.

18:29What exactly happens here? Anthropics AWS bills are not really going down. They've normalized in an 88 to 95 % range, and they're clearly going to stay there. And if your argument is, uh, they'll go down, your argument is quite literally, nah-ah. Go read semi-analysis for 17 hours and come up with some demented GPU-based argument about inference max scores. Pretend like you give a shit. Come up with a real argument against mine, because I am working harder at this than you are, and if you believe otherwise, you should ask yourself why the guy who said Sam Altman's no IT loads refused cash dump in a premium newsletter got this scoop and you did not.

19:06But that actually leads me to a key question. How long do we hand Anthropic, and by extension OpenAI, billions of dollars? And for the first time in your goddamn life, it's time to ask, what if I'm right? What if these companies are incapable of becoming profitable? What if there really is no massive demand for generative AI? Do you really think Anthropic will make$1.6 billion a month sometime in 2026? do you really think that and even for amazon it's kind of shit wow two do a couple billion on what 105 billion dollars of capex i might have even said this later in the script but just thinking about it makes me feel a little crazy and look i get there's a middle ground here where people say that there's some sort of use case that sort of works for ai where you hit it hard enough or write good enough prompts or whatever that you like it for search that you brainstorm with it they helped you pick out a hat that you used it to solve some sort of problem once.

20:04And I just want to ask you, how much are those anecdotes really worth to you? How impressed with these things are you? Would you pay double, triple, quadruple? Would you pay on a metered basis where those little flights of fancy cost you a few cents, then 10 cents, then a dollar? Because that's how much it costs to provide these services. And at some point you're going to be made to pay for it one way or another.

20:35Hey, it's Bobby from the Bobby Bone Show. I had an incredible time at this year's iHeartRadio Music Festival and even got the chance to hang out with Diplo and Bailey Zimmerman while I was there. Check this out. So how did Ashes come together, Diplo? Well, I kind of briefly met Bailey, I think at Morgan's show, one of them. And I think he's just a guy in Nashville. He's cool as hell. And I had a new kind of sound I wanted to do. and I think he's the one guy that can carry it. And I came to his house. I had a show. I pulled up real quick. He was about to leave on tour. You're about to jump in your tour bus and we had like three hours, play the record for him.

21:10We kind of like got a scratch and then he handled it on his own on the road. Yeah, it was really cool. He really just like randomly showed up to my house and I'm like, oh, hey, Diplo, what are you doing? He's like, I have a song that I want to show you. And I was like, okay. And then now we're here playing it live. You can listen to the full episode out now wherever you get your podcasts. And big shout out to my friends at Hyundai for making this possible. At a blast, cruising around festival weekend in the all new Palisade Hybrid. Living sustainably can feel overwhelming. Most people don't have time to overhaul their whole life.

21:42But that's where Cleanomic comes in. Cleanomic isn't about perfection. It's about progress. It's about those small switches that add up, like trading plastic bags for compostable ones. Or ditching toxic detergent jugs for a slim sleeve of laundry sheets. If you're ready to make small switches with a big impact, go to Cleanomic.com and check out their curated bundles. You can even take 20 % off with code SWITCH20. Cleaner, safer, smarter. Cleanomic.com. This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? Business software is expensive. And when you buy software from lots of different companies, it's not only expensive, it gets confusing, slow to use, hard to integrate.

22:21Odoo solves that because all Odoo software is connected on a single affordable platform. Save money without missing out on the features you need. Odoo has no hidden costs and no limit on features or data. Odoo has over 60 apps available for any needs your business might have, all at no additional charge. Everything from websites to sales to inventory to accounting, all linked and talking to each other. Check out Odoo at O-D-O-O dot com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

23:19Go to shopflavcity.com and grab yours before it's gone. Advertising won't be the answer, by the way. The literal only company to try advertising in large language models is an AI search engine company called Perplexity. And they just paused accepting new advertisers to, and I quote Adweek, rethink how ads fit into its AI search experience. They made$20 ,000 in 2024 in advertising revenue. are we supposed to be impressed that perplexity made enough revenue to buy a second-hand toyota corolla there are people making more money than that slinging fucking herbalife and this is literally the exact company that should have succeeded based on any kind of ads will fix everything argument and they couldn't even buy courtside tickets to the nba playoffs the costs are increasing linearly with revenue and i fucking proved it i am open to any compelling arguments that can explain how this ever changes.

24:17And my god, if you say tranium, I will absolutely lose my shit. Chips aren't fixing this. And by the way, if your answer is that Anthropic will make some sort of theoretical, ultra-powerful large language model or invent AGI, you are a goddamn mark. You are being conned. Look, join me. I'm serious. There's no harm in being wrong. I've been wrong tons of times in my life. Being wrong and admitting you're wrong is an act of bravery. Shit, I actually kind of get it. This stuff feels, if you let it, like it's doing something for you, even though interacting with it is actually draining you because you're constantly having to find ways to make it do what you want it to do, to the point that when it actually does something for the first time, it almost feels magical.

25:00You feel very powerful, despite the fact that you have been put to work to make automation work. That's not how automation is meant to work. And sure, there are software engineers out there who have, like any good software engineer, found a way to take the useful parts of LLMs and use them to, to quote Karl Brown of The Internet of Bugs, make the easy things easier. Then there are the ones that are spending more time than they would building software, prompting LLMs and rewriting claw.md files, and thinking that because things sort of worked after they hit enter that they're privy to a great becoming.