Barclays said that Anthropic’s API business scale and growth rate have surpassed OpenAI, bringing huge revenue contributions to AWS. Data shows that Anthropic’s API business is expected to surge to US$3.907 billion in 2025, an increase of 662%, while OpenAI will only grow by 80%. If Anthropic starts pre-training Claude 5 in the fourth quarter, plus inference revenue, Anthropic alone may contribute a total of 4% growth to AWS every quarter.
The AI growth potential of Amazon's cloud service AWS has been seriously underestimated because Anthropic's API business, with which it has in-depth cooperation, is bringing significant revenue contribution to AWS.
On September 3, Barclays’ latest analysis report showed that Anthropic’s in-depth cooperation with Amazon AWS is bringing significant growth momentum to the cloud service giant, but the market has not yet fully realized the potential of this AI-driven growth. If AWS can maintain its partnership with Anthropic for its training workloads, the company could see better-than-expected revenue growth in the fourth quarter.
Barclays analysts estimate thatAnthropic currently (Q2 2025) contributes ~1% growth to AWS, but with a dual boost from Claude 5 training and existing inference revenue, this contribution could rise to 4% per quarter. The key is that Anthropic's API business scale has surpassed OpenAI, and its growth rate is even faster.
AnthropicWill bring approximately $1.6 billion in inference revenue to AWS in 2025,Its annual recurring revenue (ARR) is expected to jump from $1 billion at the beginning of the year to $9 billion by the end of the year. However, there have been complaints in the industry about the restrictions on access to Anthropic models on the AWS Bedrock platform, indicating that the partnership between the two companies may face some challenges.
Barclays maintains an "overweight" rating on Amazon with a target price of $275, which represents a 21.7% upside potential from the current stock price.
Anthropic API business scale has surpassed OpenAI
According to Barclays analysis, Anthropic has established significant advantages over OpenAI in the API business field.
The data shows,90% of Anthropic's revenue comes from API business, while OpenAI only generates 26% of its revenue from API, and its main revenue still relies on ChatGPT consumer products.
Specifically, Anthropic’s API business will achieve revenue of US$512 million in 2024, which is expected toWill surge to US$3.907 billion in 2025,A year-on-year increase of 662%. By comparison, OpenAI’s API business will have revenue of $1 billion in 2024,Expected to grow to US$1.8 billion in 2025,Growth rate is 80%.
This difference is mainly due to the explosive growth of AI integrated development environment (IDE) applications.
AI programming tools such as Cursor and Lovable obtain model authorization through Anthropic's Direct API and pay per million tokens. Barclays estimates,The average Cursor Pro user contributes about $5 in revenue to AWS per month.
The launch of models such as Claude 3.5 (released in June 2024) and Claude 3.7 (released in February 2025), especially the reasoning and thinking chain capabilities incorporated into the latter, have promoted Anthropic's leading position in the API field.
The report pointed out that the AI integrated development environment as a category is expected to have an ARR of more than $1 billion in 2025, while this number will be almost zero in 2024.
AWS expected to achieve better-than-expected growth in fourth quarter
Barclays expects fourth-quarter revenue growth to be about 2% higher than market expectations if Amazon's cloud service AWS can maintain its partnership with Anthropic.
The current market consensus is that AWS fourth-quarter revenue growth is 18%, but Anthropic's contribution may push the actual growth rate to significantly exceed this expectation..
Analysts pointed out that Anthropic may start pre-training for Claude 5 in the fourth quarter.This will contribute approximately 1.5% growth to AWS. Together with inference revenue, Anthropic could contribute a total of 4% to AWS growth.
According to the research report, Barclays' model assumes that AWS non-AI workloads maintain a year-on-year growth trend of 14%-16%, which is consistent with the performance of the past few quarters. On this basis,Anthropic’s additional contribution will significantly boost overall growth rate.
AI capacity expansion supports long-term growth prospects
To support the rapid growth of AI business, AWS is significantly expanding its AI computing capabilities.
Barclays estimates,AWS may have over 1 million H100 equivalent AI capacity by the end of 2025, thanks to the launch of Blackwell GPUs and 400,000 Trainium "Project Rainier" chips.
However, it remains controversial whether AWS has enough AI capacity to support all the growth activities of Anthropic's business. On its second-quarter earnings call, Amazon management continued its standard narrative of demand outpacing supply without providing much new confidence.
Barclays' analysis shows that the new AI capacity added since the launch of ChatGPT is expected to exceed 1 million H100 equivalent computing power by the end of 2025.This capacity expansion is critical to supporting the rapid growth of partners like Anthropic.
Deep partnerships face potential challenges
Barclays said that although the partnership between Anthropic and AWS has brought significant benefits, the relationship between the two parties has also faced some tests.
According to previous media reports, there have been some complaints in the industry about accessing Anthropic models through Amazon AWS Bedrock, which indicates that there may be some degree of rift in the Amazon AWS/Anthropic relationship.
What’s even more noteworthy is that important customers such as Cursor (one of Anthropic’s largest IDE customers) are beginning to turn to OpenAI’s GPT-5 API as the default choice. While users can manually switch back to Anthropic, the stickiness is nowhere near as strong as the white-label paid search default in the consumer space.
Despite some uncertainty, Barclays remains bullish on AWS's long-term prospects in the AI field.
Analysts at the bank pointed out that although the "widespread expansion" phase of AI deployment in 2025 has not yet truly arrived,A handful of large AI labs are currently generating the majority of AI revenue for hyperscale cloud service providers, and AWS’ deep partnership with Anthropic places it at the heart of this trend.
It's worth noting that Barclays' analysis is based on the assumption that 70% of Anthropic's revenue is hosted on AWS, with the remaining 30% on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Anthropic is the only AI lab with three different infrastructure teams that manage training and inference on three different architectures: GPU, TPU and Trainium, which provides it with flexibility in terms of cost and availability.