Amazon reported second quarter 2026 net income of $62.6 billion, against $18.2 billion in the same quarter a year earlier [1]. That is an increase of $44.4 billion. In the same release, the company writes: "Second quarter 2026 net income includes non-operating pre-tax other income of $53.4 billion, primarily from our investments in Anthropic." [1]
The Associated Press story that moved on the wire that afternoon, headlined "Amazon profit surges as AWS sales rise 37%", opens this way: "Amazon.com Inc. delivered strong profit and net sales during its fiscal second quarter, helped by surging growth in its prominent cloud computing unit." [2] That sentence is what we are correcting. It is not a wrong number. It is a wrong cause.
Start with what the AP piece gets right, because it is nearly everything. "Amazon reported net income of $62.65 billion, or $5.75 per share, in the three-month period ended June 30," the story says, and "That compares with $18.16 billion or $1.68 per share, in the year-ago period." [2] Both figures match Amazon's own release [1]. The AWS growth rate in the headline, 37 percent, matches. The year ago comparisons match. We checked the reported figures in that story against the primary and found no discrepancy. Anyone claiming the AP printed a bad number is wrong, and this correction does not say that.
The AWS number is also genuinely a story. Growth of 37 percent, up from 28 percent the prior quarter, is an acceleration in the largest cloud business in the market, and it deserves a headline on its own merits. A wire editor who decided the cloud acceleration was the most newsworthy thing in the release made a defensible call. The problem is the next step, where the acceleration is offered as the explanation for the profit figure.
Here is the arithmetic, which takes two subtractions. Net income moved from $18.2 billion to $62.6 billion, a change of $44.4 billion [1]. Operating income, which is what the North America, International and AWS segments together actually produced, moved from $19.2 billion to $27.5 billion, a change of $8.3 billion [1]. Divide the second by the first and operating performance, cloud growth included, accounts for at most about 19 percent of the increase in net income. The other four fifths sit outside the operating businesses, and Amazon names the item: $53.4 billion of non-operating pre-tax other income, primarily from its investments in Anthropic [1].
One caveat on that comparison, in the interest of not overstating it. The $53.4 billion figure is pre-tax and net income is after tax, so the two do not reconcile dollar for dollar, and no one should treat the difference as a precise decomposition. The direction is not in question. A non-operating item larger than the entire year over year change in net income is the dominant term, and the operating businesses are the minority term by a wide margin.
The distinction matters because the two kinds of money behave differently. Operating income is what customers paid Amazon for goods, ads and compute, less what it cost to deliver them. Non-operating other income of the kind disclosed here is a revaluation of an asset the company holds, in this case its stake in Anthropic. It is a mark on a position, not cash collected from running a business, and it can move the other way next quarter without a single customer changing behavior. Telling readers that a profit number came from the cloud unit when it mostly came from the revaluation of an equity stake is not a rounding difference in emphasis. It changes what the number means.
We searched the full text of the AP story for "$53.4 billion", "non-operating", "operating income", "mark-to-market", "revaluation" and "investment gain". None of those strings appear anywhere in the piece [2]. Anthropic is mentioned once, in an unrelated sentence: "In April, Amazon signed big deals with OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta." [2] The omission is of the disclosure, not of the company's name. A reader reaching that sentence has no way to connect it to the profit figure in the headline, because the piece never tells them there is anything to connect.
The strongest evidence that this was available material is what a competitor did with the identical release on the identical day. Variety's headline reads: "Amazon Q2 Ad Revenue Up 26% as Tech Giant's Profit Booms to $62.6 Billion on Anthropic Investments" [3]. Another newsroom, working from the same primary document, put the actual driver in its own headline. The disclosure is not buried in a footnote or reconstructed from a segment table. It sits in the summary portion of the release, in Amazon's own sentence, which is where a wire reporter on an earnings deadline would be reading [1].
What gives this reach is the distribution. This is AP business copy, and AP business copy on a company the size of Amazon runs with minor localization on scores of member papers and broadcast affiliates. The framing in that lede is not one newspaper's framing. It is the version of the quarter that lands in local markets where nobody else is covering Amazon's earnings at all, and where the reader has no second story to check it against. The practical result is a large audience told that Amazon's businesses produced a $44.4 billion swing in profit when the businesses produced $8.3 billion of it.
Our rating on the claim: the figures are accurate, the causal framing is misleading. The remedy is one sentence, and it is a sentence Amazon already wrote.
