Anthropic weighs building more of its payments and billing stack

Anthropic is evaluating whether to build in-house parts of its billing, payments, fraud and tax infrastructure, reducing reliance on Stripe. The move comes after revenue surged to more than $11.5 billion in its second quarter, up from $787 million a year earlier, according to CNBC.

Build-versus-buy across payments operations

Anthropic is running build-versus-buy evaluations across billing, payments, fraud detection and tax, The Information reported, citing recent job postings. A staff software engineer role focused on pricing, payments, contracts, entitlements and reconciliation suggests the company is considering owning more of its economics and transaction risk controls rather than only technical components.

The company’s payments scope goes beyond token usage. It must handle acceptance, fraud detection, failed payments and taxes across jurisdictions, while also supporting invoicing and reconciliation as pricing changes.

Stripe is central, but not guaranteed

Anthropic already uses Stripe across payments, billing, its fraud tool Radar and Data Pipeline. Stripe says Radar reduced legitimate transactions incorrectly blocked as fraud by 83%, and Data Pipeline shortened month-end reconciliation by six days.

A spokesperson also said Stripe remains a partner for scaling while Anthropic focuses on innovation and serving customers. That comment was made in a Stripe case study before Anthropic’s revenue nearly tripled in a single quarter.

Stripe’s scale and Metronome’s usage billing

Stripe’s argument centers on scale. Stripe acquired Metronome, its usage-based billing platform, for roughly $1 billion in a deal that closed in January. Stripe says Metronome processes more than 35 billion usage events a month and can handle over 100,000 events per second.

Stripe also says 86% of the Forbes AI 50 monetize through Stripe. Metronome counts Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks and Nvidia among its customers.

OpenAI takes a different route: routing and redundancy

OpenAI is tackling similar constraints without building its own core infrastructure. The Information reported that OpenAI moved its stored card data to an independent intermediary and added Adyen alongside Stripe, so it can route transactions across processors instead of relying on 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.

Why this matters

For fast-growing AI businesses, billing and payments architecture affects both cash flow and operational risk. Anthropic’s decision will determine how much control it can keep over pricing and fraud systems, while OpenAI’s processor-agnostic approach shows how redundancy can be used to manage platform dependence.