Anthropic is building the same kind of multi-product ecosystem that has helped make tech companies like Amazon and Uber extremely sticky, and its S-1 suggests the strategy is working. More than half of customers spending at least $100,000 a year now use both the Claude platform and a proprietary app like Claude Code or Cowork, up from about 30% at the end of last year.
“The speed and scale of adoption by our enterprise customers is powerful evidence of Claude’s position on the frontier of AI,” reads the S-1 filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
As of September 30, Anthropic recorded more than 11,900 customers spending at least $100,000; over 1,900 customers spending over $1 million; and approximately 250 clients spend $10 million or more annually.
Anthropic attributes the customer momentum to a “significant expansion in usage as customers realize the value of deploying Claude in their organization,” which resulted in net revenue retention of approximately 900% at the end of the third quarter.
Casting shade over the entire existing SaaS industry, Anthropic presents Claude not as a “static product that serves a single use case”, but rather as a “cutting-edge AI with rapidly evolving capabilities” spanning models, development platform and applications that users directly interact with.
“A breakthrough at any layer extends to all three layers, accelerating the pace at which we can deliver better intelligence,” the filing reads, calling this “integrated approach” the reason more customers are using both the Claude platform and proprietary applications.
The playbook is familiar. Uber started by selling rides but has expanded into food delivery and freight. With AWS, Amazon attracted customers with cloud computing services before expanding those relationships to storage, databases and other offerings, making the ecosystem increasingly difficult to exit. Like these companies, Anthropic doesn’t need to sell every product to a completely new buyer: a company starting with the API can deploy Claude Code to its engineers, then Cowork to its entire staff.
These app users become much more valuable. In the third quarter, the top 5% of Claude Enterprise customers who used Claude Code spent about 20 times more per month than the average enterprise user who did not use the coding tool, according to the filing. These results demonstrate room for growth in spend per user and illustrate why Anthropic wants to integrate its applications into accounts that start with the API.
Anthropic said it is amplifying this organic delivery by investing in applied AI teams. An internal applied AI team works with startups and enterprises to help place Claude into clients’ existing technology stacks, and the company recently launched a separate venture with Blackstone and other private equity firms, called Ode with Anthropic, to integrate forward-deployed engineers into enterprises to build bespoke AI tools with Claude.
Anthropic also leverages its third-party distribution partnerships with hyperscalers AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Under what the filing calls a “joint go-to-market approach,” Anthropic maintains a direct contractual relationship with customers and pays each cloud provider a fee, which the company says allows it to “avoid channel conflicts” and “set prices.”
Anthropic’s nascent strategy could become critical as the AI giant seeks to constantly “reinvent our business” by launching “new classes of products that aim to eclipse the economic value of our existing products.” The company says it will spend less effort than a traditional company “consolidating our current products and business models, and more effort defining new ones.”
The filing also signals headwinds, despite impressive revenue growth of $16.3 billion for the first half of 2026, compared to $1.2 billion for the same period last year. The cloud partnerships that help sell Claude increasingly view Anthropic as a competitor, which Anthropic fears could lead to difficulty getting the compute it needs from them. The filing says Amazon, Google and Microsoft can prioritize their own requirements or those of competitors they have invested in.
Another risk is customer concentration.
“Any adverse change in demand from our largest customers…could harm our business and prospects,” the risk factors section reads. “As a result, a significant reduction in spending or loss of one or more of our largest customers, if not offset by new customer relationships or increased business from our other existing customers, could have a negative impact on our business, financial condition and results of operations. »
Anthropic did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
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