Anthropic’s In-House Payments Tech Push Could Chip Away at Stripe

Anthropic is looking to build more billing, fraud detection and other financial infrastructure in-house and evaluating which payments-related services it can build itself rather than relying on outside providers, recent job postings show.

Fast-growing Anthropic is at the center of the AI boom, where soaring usage and complex token-based pricing are making collecting payments increasingly tough for companies to manage. The hiring efforts raise the prospect that Anthropic could reduce its reliance on Stripe and other payment-related firms for certain services.

That could pose a challenge for Stripe, which has long pitched its ability to get in early with hot startups and deepen those relationships as they grow. The payments giant in particular has highlighted its recent work in infrastructure for AI companies that can handle the growing complexity of their payments.

But just last month, Anthropic’s main rival, OpenAI, which has long worked with Stripe, signed up payment rival Adyen as an additional payment provider, Adyen announced. Both moves underscore the logic of Stripe’s decision to buy OpenRouter for more than $7 billion. OpenRouter sits between developers and AI model providers and charges fees to the buyers of the services as opposed to the sellers, giving Stripe another way to generate revenue from AI-related payments.

Stripe, for its part, has promoted how Anthropic uses a range of Stripe products in addition to its core processing, including Stripe’s Link checkout, its Radar service for real-time risk scoring and fraud detection, as well as invoicing and usage-based billing services.

Some of Anthropic’s recent job posts reflect how the firm’s rapid growth—which had lifted annualized revenue nearly fivefold, to almost $45 billion, in just five months by May—has complicated operations. In a job posting for someone who would overhaul Anthropic’s order management, provisioning, billing, invoicing and other related systems, Anthropic says its “business is scaling faster than the processes and systems that support it.”

Anthropic still has to decide whether to build more of its own tools or to keep buying from outside providers in areas including payments, billing and handling taxes, the posts say. One job, for a staff software engineer in billing, would involve helping Anthropic decide where it should build further on outside providers’ platforms in those areas and “where to build our own primitives around them.”

For that role, the description says candidates should preferably have direct experience integrating or extending third-party billing and payment platforms, as well as “opinions on where they fall short.” It also seeks experience with improving payment approval rates, cutting processing costs and reducing payment fraud.

Meanwhile, an engineering role focused on financial fraud describes building systems to assess payment risks in real time, plus tools for handling disputed charges and detecting people gaming Anthropic’s subscriptions and promotions.

Building more payment infrastructure in-house could also give Anthropic more control over payment costs and cut down on the fees it pays to outside firms. Though payment and related fees are small as a percentage of each transaction, they can add up, especially for AI companies handling payments from a large number of small developers. More mature companies often also build such financial infrastructure in-house as they grow.

Stripe, for instance, generates the majority of its revenue by taking a cut of the payments it processes, charging 2.9% of volume plus a set fee per transaction, though bigger customers often pay less. A smaller portion of Stripe’s revenue comes from billing and other add-on offerings, which it either charges additional fees for on top of processing or wraps into bundles of services it sells together.

To be sure, it would be a long process for Anthropic to replace Stripe or other payment and billing vendors entirely, especially for payment processing, if Anthropic decides to do so. The postings don’t explicitly say Anthropic is taking any steps to eliminate outside processors. And big, established companies tend to continue to outsource payment processing as they build more sophisticated payment operations internally, though they tend to add multiple providers as they grow.

“Stripe has been a strong partner to Anthropic for years, and we continue to work with them across our business,” an Anthropic spokesperson said. Stripe did not respond to requests for comment.

The posts also indicate similar buy-versus-build decisions happening elsewhere in Anthropic’s finance operations. That includes efforts related to an overhaul and centralization of its corporate treasury functions, the postings show.

A treasury strategy and transformation role mentions responsibilities including consolidating Anthropic’s banking relationships, suggesting the company’s own cash needs and banking operations have gotten complex as well. The posts highlight new technology for treasury operations, with one for a treasury finance systems senior manager saying the team is building “the production-grade financial applications that no vendor has built for us yet.”

That post flags the company making buy-versus-build decisions for treasury management systems, software platforms that track cash flows and manage bank relationships, typically offered by companies like FIS, Kyriba and Trovata.

AI Pays Off for Payments

Stripe has benefited greatly from booming growth in the AI sector. The payment firm’s revenue growth accelerated to around 33% last year, its fastest since the pandemic-driven e-commerce boom in 2021.

At the same time, some of its biggest and oldest customers have branched out. Shopify, which has long used Stripe to process payments for its merchants, added PayPal as a payment processor for some U.S. transactions two years ago. More recently, Shopify has been securing state money transmitter licenses, which could help it move further away from relying on Stripe for financial services that involve holding customer money.

Stripe has been leaning into catering to the AI market, promoting offerings that help customers with areas like turning volatile token usage into accurate invoices and cutting down on fraud, such as people using phony accounts to claim free credits. In January, Stripe acquired usage-based billing startup Metronome for a reported $1 billion, beefing up its capabilities for metering and charging for AI.

But OpenAI had already started laying the groundwork earlier this year for branching out beyond Stripe: OpenAI struck a deal to move where it stores customer credit card data to an intermediary firm instead of using Stripe’s own service to house the information, The Information reported. That change would give the company more flexibility to easily work with multiple payment providers.

And Stripe competitors have been beefing up AI-focused features as well. When Adyen announced it had signed OpenAI as a customer last month, executives said on its earnings call that it was providing payment services to OpenAI, but noted that it had recently acquired usage-based billing startup Orb, a $335 million deal.