截至 9 月 30 日，Anthropic 记录了超过 11,900 家年支出至少 10 万美元的客户；超过 1,900 家年支出超过 100 万美元的客户；以及约 250 家年支出 1,000 万美元或更多的客户。
Anthropic 将客户的强劲势头归因于“随着客户意识到在组织内部署 Claude 的价值，使用量显著扩大”，这推动截至第三季度末的净收入留存率约为 900%。
Anthropic 对整个传统 SaaS 行业暗含批评，它将 Claude 定位为不是“服务于单一用例的静态产品”，而是“具有快速进步能力的尖端 AI”，涵盖模型、开发者平台以及用户直接交互的应用程序。
“任何一层的进步都会在所有三个层面产生复利效应，加速我们交付更强大智能的速度，”该文件写道，并将这种“集成方法”称为更多客户同时使用 Claude 平台和第一方应用的原因。
这套打法并不陌生。Uber 最初以销售乘车服务起家，但后来扩展到外卖配送和货运领域。通过 AWS，亚马逊先以云计算服务吸引客户，然后将这些关系扩展到存储、数据库和其他服务，使得生态系统越来越难以离开。像这些公司一样，Anthropic 不必向全新买家销售每种产品：一家从 API 开始的企业可以将其工程师部署到 Claude Code，然后将其更广泛的工作团队部署到 Cowork。
这些应用用户的价值变得更高。根据该文件，在第三季度，使用 Claude Code 的支出最高的前 5% 的 Claude Enterprise 客户，其每月支出大约是未使用该编码工具的平均企业用户的 20 倍。这一发现展示了每位用户支出仍有巨大的增长空间，也说明了为什么 Anthropic 急于将其应用程序引入那些以 API 为起点的账户。
Anthropic 表示，它通过投资应用 AI 团队来放大这种有机扩散。一个内部的应用 AI 团队与初创企业和企业合作，帮助将 Claude 嵌入客户现有的技术栈中；该公司最近还与黑石集团（Blackstone）及其他私募股权公司合作推出了一项名为 Ode with Anthropic 的新举措，旨在将前置部署工程师嵌入企业中，利用 Claude 构建定制化的 AI 工具。
Anthropic 还依靠其与超大规模云服务商 AWS、Google Cloud 和 Microsoft Azure 的第三方分销合作伙伴关系。在该文件所称的“联合上市方法”下，Anthropic 与客户保持直接的合同关系，并向每家云提供商支付费用，该公司称这使其能够“避免渠道冲突”并“设定价格”。
随着这家 AI 巨头寻求不断“重塑我们的业务”，通过发布“旨在超越现有产品经济价值的新类产品类别”，Anthropic 初具雏形的粘性战略可能变得至关重要。该公司表示，它将比典型企业投入更少精力去“巩固我们当前的产品和商业模式”，而投入更多精力去“定义新的产品和商业模式”。
尽管 2026 年上半年收入大幅增长至 163 亿美元，高于去年同期的 12 亿美元，但该文件也指出了逆风因素。帮助销售 Claude 的云合作伙伴越来越多地将 Anthropic 视为竞争对手，Anthropic 表示这可能导致从它们那里获得所需计算资源时遇到困难。该文件指出，亚马逊、谷歌和微软可能会优先考虑自身需求或它们已投资的竞争对手。
“来自我们最大客户的任何需求不利变化……都可能对我们的业务和前景产生不利影响，”风险因素部分的一段文字写道。“因此，如果未能通过新客户关系的建立或增加其他现有客户的业务来抵消，主要客户之一支出的大幅减少或流失，可能会对我们的业务、财务状况和经营结果产生不利影响。”
Rebecca Bellan 是 TechCrunch 的高级记者，负责报道塑造人工智能的商业、政策和新兴趋势。她的工作也曾刊登在《福布斯》、彭博社、《大西洋月刊》、《每日野兽》和其他出版物上。
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Anthropic is building the same kind of cross-product ecosystem that helped make tech companies like Amazon and Uber enormously sticky, and its S-1 suggests the strategy is working. More than half of customers spending at least $100,000 annually now use both the Claude platform and a first-party app like Claude Code or Cowork, up from about 30% at the end of last year.
“The speed and depth of our enterprise customer adoption are powerful evidence of Claude’s position at the frontier of AI,” the S-1, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, reads.
As of September 30, Anthropic recorded more than 11,900 customers spending at least $100,000; more than 1,900 customers spending upward of $1 million; and about 250 customers spending $10 million or more annually.
Anthropic attributes customer momentum to a “significant usage expansion as customers realize the value of deploying Claude across their organizations,” which drove net revenue retention of about 900% as of the end of the third quarter.
Throwing shade at the entire legacy SaaS industry, Anthropic pitches Claude as not a “static product that serves a single use case,” but rather “frontier AI with rapidly advancing capabilities” spanning the models, the developer platform, and the applications users interact with directly.
“An advance at any layer compounds across all three layers, accelerating the pace at which we can deliver more capable intelligence,” the filing reads, calling this “integrated approach” the reason more customers use both the Claude Platform and first-party apps.
The playbook is familiar. Uber began by selling rides but has expanded into food delivery and freight. With AWS, Amazon drew in customers with cloud computing services before expanding those relationships into storage, databases, and other offerings, making the ecosystem increasingly hard to leave. Like those companies, Anthropic doesn’t have to sell each product to a brand-new buyer: A business that starts with the API can deploy Claude Code to their engineers and then Cowork to their broader workforce.
Those app users become far more valuable. In the third quarter, the highest-spending 5% of Claude Enterprise customers who used Claude Code spent about 20x as much per month as the average enterprise user who didn’t use the coding tool, per the filing. The finding demonstrates how much room there is for per-user spend to grow, and illustrates why Anthropic is keen to get its applications into the accounts that start with the API.
Anthropic said it amplifies that organic diffusion by investing in Applied AI teams. An internal Applied AI team works with startups and enterprises to help place Claude inside customers’ existing technology stacks, and the company recently launched a separate venture with Blackstone and other private equity firms, dubbed Ode with Anthropic, to embed forward-deployed engineers into businesses to build bespoke AI tools with Claude.
Anthropic also leans on 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 holds the direct contractual relationship with customers and pays each cloud provider a fee, which the company says lets it “avoid channel conflict” and “set pricing.”
Anthropic’s budding stickiness strategy may become essential as the AI giant seeks to constantly “reinvent our business” by releasing “new classes of products whose aim is to dwarf the economic value of our existing ones.” The company says it will devote less effort than a typical business to “entrenching our current products and business models, and more effort to defining new ones.”
The filing also flags headwinds, despite impressive revenue growth of $16.3 billion for the first half of 2026, up from $1.2 billion in the same period last year. The cloud partnerships that help sell Claude are increasingly seeing Anthropic as a competitor, which Anthropic says could lead to difficulties securing the compute it needs from them. The filing states that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft may prioritize their own requirements or rivals they’ve invested in.
Customer concentration is another risk.
“Any adverse change in demand from our largest customers … could adversely affect our business and prospects,” reads part of the risk factors section. “As a result, a significant reduction in spending by, or the 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 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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Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch where she covers the business, policy, and emerging trends shaping artificial intelligence. Her work has also appeared in Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and other publications.
You can contact or verify outreach from Rebecca by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at rebeccabellan.491 on Signal.
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