Anthropic‘s S-1 filing with the SEC shows the company is deliberately following the same cross-product ecosystem playbook that helped make Amazon and Uber sticky, and the numbers in the filing indicate 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 such as Claude Code or Cowork, up from about 30% at the end of last year. As of September 30, Anthropic had more than 11,900 customers spending at least $100,000, more than 1,900 customers spending upwards of $1 million, and about 250 customers spending $10 million or more per year. The company reports net revenue retention of about 900% as of the end of the third quarter, attributing this to significant usage expansion as customers deploy Claude across their organizations.

The filing positions Claude as frontier AI spanning three layers: models, developer platform, and applications. Anthropic argues that an advance at any layer compounds across all three, which is why customers use both the platform and first-party apps. In contrast to what it calls a static product serving a single use case, Anthropic frames Claude as rapidly advancing capabilities. The expansion pattern resembles Uber moving from rides into delivery and freight, or Amazon extending from cloud computing into storage and databases. A business that starts with the API can adopt Claude Code for engineers and then Cowork for a broader workforce, making those users far more valuable. In the third quarter, the highest-spending 5% of Claude Enterprise customers who used Claude Code spent about 20 times as much per month as the average enterprise user who did not.

Anthropic says it amplifies this organic diffusion with Applied AI teams that work with startups and enterprises, and through a new venture with Blackstone and other private equity firms called Ode with Anthropic, which embeds forward deployed engineers in businesses to build bespoke AI tools with Claude. Distribution partnerships with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure also support growth. Under the filing’s joint go-to-market approach, Anthropic holds the direct contractual relationship with customers and pays each cloud provider a fee, which it says avoids channel conflict and lets it set pricing.

The company says it will focus less on entrenching current products and more on defining new ones, releasing new product classes aimed at dwarfing the economic value of existing ones. Still, the filing flags headwinds. Anthropic‘s revenue growth is strong — $16.3 billion for the first half of 2026, up from $1.2 billion in the same period last year — but the cloud partners that sell Claude increasingly treat Anthropic as a competitor, which could affect access to compute. The filing says Amazon, Google, and Microsoft may prioritize their own requirements or rivals they have invested in. Customer concentration is also listed as a risk: a significant reduction in spending or loss of one or more of Anthropic‘s largest customers could hurt the business if not offset by new relationships or increased spending from others. Anthropic did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.