Amazon's Andy Jassy (left) and Google's Sundar Pichai. If you want indirect exposure to Anthropic without buying its shares directly, you could look to Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) or Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL).

Anthropic's updated IPO filing on Tuesday disclosed the size of the Anthropic stakes held by these two tech giants, as well as the paper returns on their early investments in the AI company.

Neither tech giant holds voting shares in Anthropic, so antitrust regulators need not worry that they will interfere with the company's management and operations. But the economic interests they hold are considerable.

In theory, Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) could hold as much as roughly 20% of Anthropic's outstanding shares. However, due to a self-imposed ownership cap, Amazon's actual stake will not exceed 12%. The remainder of the position consists of convertible notes that can gradually convert into equity in the future.

Even so, the economic return on Amazon's investment is still very substantial. Setting aside the ownership cap for a moment, if measured at the midpoint of Anthropic's IPO guidance range, the value of Amazon's entire roughly 20% stake could reach $258 billion, while its actual total outlay was only about $18.6 billion. (Financial Times reporting suggests Anthropic's final IPO price is very likely to be above the initial valuation range.)

Google's return is slightly lower. It invested about $33 billion and will ultimately receive roughly a 10% stake, corresponding to a valuation of $132 billion. Even so, the return is still considerable.

Subject to certain conditions, both Amazon and Google have committed to continuing to invest further in Anthropic through 2030, so the scale of their investments will expand further. (Google also has a 14.99% ownership cap, which will slow the conversion of convertible notes tied to its future investments.)

Those figures cover only the equity investment portion. Amazon and Google will also secure massive cloud business orders from Anthropic. Anthropic's latest filing states that, regardless of actual usage, the company has committed to spending at least $121 billion with Google Cloud through July 2033. In addition, Anthropic has committed to spending up to another $150 billion to procure computing resources powered by Google TPU AI chips.

Anthropic has also committed to investing at least $110 billion in Amazon's cloud unit through 2036, also a minimum commitment "regardless of actual usage." Anthropic has also signed similar large-scale agreements with Microsoft and SpaceX: a total of $49 billion with Microsoft by 2033, and up to $120.5 billion with SpaceX by 2029.

In AI, and in the software arena, Anthropic is increasingly becoming a competitor to the tech giants. For example, after Anthropic released new products on Tuesday targeting Microsoft's and Google's office software, shares of both Microsoft and Google fell. But this industry has always been one where gains come with losses. Anthropic could not have grown to where it is today without the technological foundations built by major tech companies, and the giants' original bets were intended to drive their own cloud businesses. Now, those bets have brought the tech giants extremely generous returns.