Hi there,
This week Anthropic filed its S-1, the SEC document required ahead of an IPO.
Watching the reaction across the internet, and especially in capital markets spaces, has been fun.
Anthropic have built a fantastic business, and too many people are lost in the headlines and not actually taking the time to read the document and think about what all of this means for your own business.
Take for example the “closing the loop” concept.
“closing the loop” refers to a development cycle in which successive versions of an AI model assist in building the next, with the goal of compounding capability gains over time.
For business owners, Anthropic is essentially implementing continuous improvement with AI models, as a mental model for how to use AI to run your business. You want AI to be optimising every constraint and removing every blocker at pace.
Anthropic runs on Slack. Claude is in Slack and has access to all that context. Agents autonomously do things. Code written by AI is evolving to AI research experiments driven by AI supervised by the PhD holding experts.
This is operating model compression, like I’ve been writing about in this newsletter for ages, happening at warp speed.
If Anthropic has been able to drive this to revenue per employee of US$6.6 million per the S-1 filing, imagine what even a modest implementation of the same concept can do for your business.
Yet adoption is still too slow and not aggressive enough. People are scared about risks, worried about governance, and not understanding that you need the best AI models to defend yourself from cyber risks now.
Here is what Anthropic disclosed about how spend is evolving inside enterprise customers:
In addition, as of September 30, 2026, we had more than 1,900 customers with $1 million or more of revenue on a TTM basis and approximately 250 customers with $10 million or more of revenue on a TTM basis. Despite this growth, our penetration into the largest enterprises remains early. Over 50% of the Fortune 500 and over 30% of the Global 2000 were customers with $100,000 or more of revenue on a TTM basis as of September 30, 2026.
We believe we are in the early stages of our expansion within these customers, with our revenue from these Fortune 500 customers representing, on average, less than 0.1% of their total expenses for the three months ended September 30, 2026. We compare this measure against our largest Fortune 500 customers, who are further along in their adoption of AI.
For the three months ended September 30, 2026, revenue from our top 10 Fortune 500 customers represented, on average, less than 1% of their total expenses—still a small fraction of their overall spend, but over eight times the average of our Fortune 500 customers with $100,000 or more of revenue on a TTM basis.
In the S-1 filing, Anthropic disclose that spend intensity is still tiny even at their biggest clients. To my mind, it highlights how curiosity and experimentation are so important.
If you are behind the curve on AI adoption, it’s a people and change problem. The technology is already good enough to help AI frontier labs accelerate. Why are you still thinking that your business is special?
Increasing AI spend intensity is one of the easiest plays a business owner can run today. Instead of worrying about cost control of modest plans or making horrifically short-sighted decisions like restricting use of the best models to “save money”, time block a free spending experimentation phase.
