Anthropic Wants More Control Over Its Payments Stack

Anthropic’s revenue jumped to more than $11.5 billion in its second quarter, up from $787 million a year earlier, CNBC reported. That pace of growth is pushing the company to weigh a harder question than most startups face: keep renting its financial infrastructure or start building it.

Anthropic is running build-versus-buy evaluations across billing, payments, fraud detection and tax, potentially reducing how much it relies on Stripe, The Information reported, based on the artificial intelligence company’s recent job postings. “Stripe has been a strong partner to Anthropic for years, and we continue to work with them across our business,” an Anthropic spokesperson told The Information.

The relationship being reconsidered runs deep. Anthropic already uses Stripe across payments, billing, its fraud tool Radar and Data Pipeline, and the results have been concrete: Radar cut legitimate transactions incorrectly blocked as fraud by 83%, and Data Pipeline shortened Anthropic’s month-end reconciliation by six days, Stripe said in its case study on the partnership. “We count on Stripe for scaling our business, so we can focus on innovating and serving our customers,” Anthropic said in that same case study, a line written before the company’s revenue nearly tripled in a single quarter.

What Running Payments Actually Requires

That’s the tension underneath the job postings. Anthropic’s Billing Platform team is evaluating what to build itself while “leaning heavily on third-party providers such as Stripe” for everything else, according to the job listing’s language for a staff software engineer role overseeing pricing, payments, contracts, entitlements and reconciliation. Running payments in-house means more than calculating token usage. A company has to manage acceptance, fraud detection, failed payments and taxes across jurisdictions, all while handling invoicing and reconciliation. And it has to keep adapting as pricing shifts, something that happens faster in AI than in most industries. The postings call for engineers who can build real-time risk assessment systems and curb promotional code abuse, roles focused on Anthropic’s own economics, not just technical plumbing.

Stripe’s counter is scale. Metronome, the usage-based billing platform Stripe bought for roughly $1 billion in a deal that closed in January, processes more than 35 billion usage events a month and can handle over 100,000 events per second, according to Stripe’s website. The company says 86% of the Forbes AI 50 monetize through Stripe. Metronome counts Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks and Nvidia among its customers. That’s the actual trade Anthropic is weighing. Building its own version means a system it can’t spread across anyone else’s business. The question is whether that still beats infrastructure already proven at a scale Anthropic alone couldn’t justify building from scratch.

OpenAI Tapped Both Stripe and Adyen

Rival OpenAI is solving a similar problem from the opposite direction. Rather than build its own infrastructure, it moved its stored card data to an independent intermediary and added Adyen alongside Stripe, The Information reported, so it can route transactions across processors instead of being locked into one. Adyen acquired Orb for roughly $335 million in July. The deal gave Adyen its own version of the usage-billing technology Stripe gained through Metronome.

The two AI companies are running different experiments on the same problem. Anthropic is testing whether owning the pieces closest to its own economics is worth the engineering cost. OpenAI is testing whether the ability to walk away from one processor is leverage enough on its own. Stripe and Adyen are both betting that as fast-growing AI companies keep scaling, there will be enough billing and payments work left to build fortunes on, whether or not any single customer decides to build its own.