Anthropic is building a similar cross-product ecosystem, a model that has helped tech companies such as Amazon and Uber develop strong user loyalty. Its S-1 documents show that this strategy is indeed effective. Today, more than half of the customers who spend at least $100,000 per year also use the Claude platform as well as first-party applications like Claude Code or Cowork; whereas at the end of last year, this proportion was around 30%.
"The speed and depth with which our corporate clients have adopted Claude is strong evidence that Claude is at the forefront of AI," the company stated in a S-1 document submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday."
As of September 30th, Anthropic has recorded over 11,900 customers with an annual consumption of at least $100,000; over 1,900 customers with an annual consumption of over $1 million; and approximately 250 customers with an annual consumption of $10 million or more.
Anthropic attributes the customer growth momentum to "significant usage expansion, as customers gradually recognized the value of deploying Claude throughout the organization," which drove its net revenue retention rate to around 900% by the end of the third quarter.
In the document, the company describes Claude as not a "static product for a single service use case," but rather as a cutting-edge AI with the ability to evolve rapidly. It covers models, developer platforms, as well as the application layer that users directly interact with, which is essentially equivalent to "dousing cold water" on the entire traditional SaaS industry.
The document states: "Progress at any one level will have a synergistic effect among the three levels, accelerating our ability to deliver greater intelligence." The company views this "integrated approach" as the reason why more customers are using both the Claude platform and first-party applications simultaneously.
This tactic is not unfamiliar. Uber initially sold taxi services, later expanding to food delivery and freight shipping. Amazon, on the other hand, first attracted customers with cloud computing services, then extended its offerings to storage, databases, and other products, making it increasingly difficult for users to leave their ecosystem. Similar to these companies, Anthropic does not have to sell each product to completely new buyers: a company that starts with API can deploy Claude Code to its engineers and then promote Cowork to a wider range of employees.
The value of these application users is much higher. The documents show that in the third quarter, among the Claude Enterprise customers using Claude Code, the top 5% of customers with the highest spending had a monthly average expenditure about 20 times that of ordinary enterprise users who did not use this coding tool. This finding indicates that there is still significant room for increasing spending per user, and it also explains why Anthropic is eager to introduce its application products to those customer accounts that initially switched from API.
Anthropic indicates that the company amplifies this natural diffusion by investing in the Applied AI team. The internal Applied AI team collaborates with startups and enterprises to help integrate Claude into customers' existing technology stacks; recently, the company also launched an independent collaboration project called “Ode with Anthropic” with Blackstone and other private equity firms, which involves deploying engineers in advance to create customized AI tools using Claude.
Anthropic also relies on third-party distribution partnerships with ultra-large cloud service providers AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. According to the "joint market promotion method" mentioned in the document, Anthropic maintains direct contractual relationships with customers and pays fees to each cloud service provider. The company states that this allows them to "avoid channel conflicts" and "set prices" on their own.
As this AI giant seeks to continuously "reshape our business" by launching "new product categories that are intended to far exceed the economic value of existing products," the Anthropic strategy, which has begun to take shape, may become crucial. The company states that, compared to typical enterprises, it will devote less effort to "consolidating existing products and business models" and instead focus more on defining new products.
Despite impressive revenue growth in the first half of the year, reaching $16.3 billion, a significant increase from $1.2 billion in the same period last year, the document also points out unfavorable factors. Cloud partners that help sell Claude are increasingly viewing Anthropic as a competitor, which may lead to difficulties for Anthropic in obtaining the necessary computing power. The document states that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft may prioritize meeting their own needs or giving preference to their invested competitors.
Customer concentration is also a risk factor.
The risk factors section states: 'If there are any adverse changes in the demands of our largest customers... it may have an adverse effect on our business and prospects.' The document also mentions: 'Therefore, if the spending of one or more of our largest customers significantly decreases, or if we lose these customers, and this impact is not offset by new customer relationships or increased business from existing customers, it may have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and operating results.'
Anthropic did not immediately respond to TechCrunch's request for a comment.
