Anthropic is building the same kind of cross-product ecosystem that has helped make tech companies like Amazon and Uber so sticky, and its S-1 suggests the strategy is working. More than half of customers who spend $100,000 or more annually now use both the Claude platform and first-party apps like Claude Code and Cowork, up from about 30% at the end of last year.
“The speed and depth of our enterprise customer adoption is strong evidence of Claude’s position on the AI frontier,” the S-1 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday said.
As of September 30, Anthropic recorded more than 11,900 customers spending at least $100,000. Over 1,900 customers have spent over $1 million. Approximately 250 customers spend more than $10 million annually.
Anthropic attributed the customer momentum to “significant usage growth as customers recognized the value of deploying Claude across their organizations,” which resulted in net revenue retention of approximately 900% at the end of the third quarter.
Casting a shadow over the traditional SaaS industry, Anthropic is pitching Claude as “frontier AI with rapidly evolving capabilities” spanning models, developer platforms, and user-directly interacted applications, rather than “a static product for a single use case.”
“Advances at any layer will compound across all three layers, accelerating the pace at which we can deliver more capable intelligence,” the filing says, noting that this “integrated approach” is why more customers are using both cloud platforms and first-party apps.
The playbook is familiar. Uber started by selling rides, but has expanded into food delivery and freight transportation. As Amazon leveraged AWS to engage customers with its cloud computing services and expanded its relationships to storage, databases, and other products, it became increasingly difficult to leave the ecosystem. Like these companies, Anthropic doesn’t need to sell each product to an entirely new buyer. Starting with APIs, companies can deploy Claude Code to their engineers and then Cowork to the broader workforce.
Those app users are much more valuable. In the third quarter, the highest-spending 5% of Claude Enterprise customers who used Claude Code spent approximately 20 times more per month than the average enterprise user who did not use the coding tool, according to the filing. This finding shows how much room there is for growth in spend per user and why Anthropic is keen to bring applications to accounts starting with APIs.
Anthropic says it will expand its organic adoption by investing in its applied AI team. Our in-house Applied AI team works with startups and enterprises to help them deploy Claude within their customers’ existing technology stacks. The company recently launched another venture with Blackstone and other private equity firms called Ode with Anthropic to embed forward-deployed engineers into the company and build bespoke AI tools with Claude.
Anthropic also relies on third-party sales partnerships with hyperscalers AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Under what the filing calls a “joint market development approach,” Anthropic will maintain direct contractual relationships with customers and pay fees to each cloud provider, which the company says will allow it to “avoid channel conflicts” and “set pricing.”
Anthropic’s up-and-coming stickiness strategy could become essential as the AI giant constantly seeks to “reinvent its business” by releasing “new classes of products that aim to trivialize the economic value of existing products.” The company says it spends “less effort than a typical company in establishing current products and business models and more effort in defining new products and business models.”
The filing also points to headwinds despite impressive sales growth of $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier. The cloud partnerships that help sell Claude increasingly view Anthropic as a competitor, which Anthropic says could make it difficult to secure the computing it needs from them. The filing states that Amazon, Google and Microsoft may prioritize their own requirements or invested rivals.
Customer concentration is another risk.
“Any adverse impact on demand from our largest customers could adversely affect our business and prospects,” it states in part in the risk factors section. “As a result, a significant reduction in, or loss of, spending by one or more of our largest customers, even if not offset by new customer relationships or increased business from other existing customers, could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.”
Anthropic did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
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