Top Claude Code Enterprise users outspend others 20 to 1, S-1 shows

A software leader planning next year's AI budget now has a number for the heavy users. Anthropic filed its S-1 with the SEC on Monday. The filing says the average Claude Enterprise user without Claude Code spent less than $75 a month in Q3. The top 5 percent of Claude Code users on the same plan spent about 20 times that. The New Stack read the filing and surfaced the figure.

What the filing says about Claude Code

Anthropic calls Claude Code "the product we believe has most concretely defined what autonomous AI work looks like". The company says non-technical teams at its customers are adopting it as well. The S-1 describes a land-and-expand pattern. An engineer picks up Claude Code and pushes it inside the company. By the time Anthropic's sales team arrives, "Claude is often already in use", the filing says.

The S-1 says Anthropic had more than 11,900 customers paying $100,000 or more. That is over the 12 months ending September 30, 2026. The figure was more than 950 a year earlier. Revenue reached $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026. Revenue in the same half of 2025 was $1.2 billion. Token usage made up 50 percent of first half revenue.

What Anthropic says about its own use of Claude

The filing says Claude wrote more than 90 percent of contributions to Anthropic's codebase in September. The company says its average engineer produced 45 times more code per day in Q3 than in 2024. The S-1 does not give a baseline for either figure.

What this means for a buyer

Anthropic says 80 percent of its revenue comes from consumption pricing. The company's gross margin on compute was 45 percent for the half. Anthropic says it earned $2.08 of revenue for every dollar it spent on compute. The ratio was $0.40 in the first quarter of 2025.

The 20 to 1 figure puts a number against a question a buyer could not answer last week. How big does Claude Code usage grow inside a company that already pays for Claude? A team deciding how much to give any one developer can read it as the ceiling so far. The gap between the two groups also sets the budget shape. One Claude Code power user costs the same as 20 regular Enterprise seats.

Anthropic says revenue growth "may not be sustainable". The filing names Taiwan chip supply as a risk. A compute shock would move prices. A buyer signing a contract this quarter now has an attributed number to anchor the terms. Any vendor meeting that opens with a different ratio is one the buyer can push back on.

Source

The New Stack on the SEC filing.