Anthropic: We don't engage in price wars; we only do valuable business.

Anthropic's Chief Business Officer explicitly stated that the company will not participate in price competition within the AI industry, but will instead focus on unlocking value for enterprise clients.

On September 3, Bloomberg, citing sources familiar with the matter, reported that Anthropic is expected to complete a $15 billion credit financing round before its IPO. The round is led by Morgan Stanley, with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup playing major roles, and Barclays and Wells Fargo also participating.

The scale of this funding round underscores the strong confidence in the AI company's IPO prospects. Anthropic's Chief Business Officer, Paul Smith, stated in a recent interview:

I have no interest in buying market share by lowering prices; I prefer to focus on my customers and how they can get the most value from the model.

Analysts believe this statement is a response to OpenAI's strategy of repeatedly lowering model pricing this summer.

Pricing Stance: Value First, Refusal to Follow Suit Price Reductions

This summer, OpenAI lowered the prices of several AI models, a move widely seen as an attempt to counter price competition from developers in the US and China. Anthropic, recognized as the current market benchmark, has chosen a completely different path.

Paul Smith has been with Anthropic for over a year, leading the company's corporate sales strategy. He has made it clear that customer value is at the heart of the pricing strategy. Paul Smith stated:

This isn't about lowering prices or anything else; it's about how to create value for customers.

Just days after the interview, Anthropic released its new model, Fable 5.1, which focuses on programming and scientific task capabilities, with the same pricing as the previous version.

However, the company moderately reduced user costs in specific situations, namely when the model invoked previously processed information.

Wall Street Insights noted that while the input and output prices of Fable 5.1 remain unchanged, the price of cache reads has decreased by 75%. According to Anthropic's calculations, the overall cost for typical workloads is reduced by approximately 25% compared to Fable 5, with costs for complex coding and highly proxied tasks potentially reduced by up to approximately 45%.

For Anthropic and OpenAI, the aggressiveness of their pricing strategies may become a key variable in their IPO process in the coming months.

Enterprise Growth: From Rapid Expansion to Refined Operations

Smith has tripled the size of Anthropic's sales team in the past year, and the company's annualized revenue forecast has increased more than tenfold during this period.

From the perspective of enterprise adoption paths, Smith describes a typical two-stage pattern. Initially, enterprises tend to loosen restrictions and encourage employees to try out AI tools widely in order to overcome organizational inertia; subsequently, enterprises begin to tighten management and finely control how different roles and functions use AI tools and how budgets are allocated.

Smith said:

In almost all cases, they continued to grow, continued to increase investment in Anthropic, and continued to use more Claude. However, in this new phase, their usage became more controlled. This was simply a natural maturation process in the organization's learning process, and the overall growth trajectory remained strong.

Recent data from Yipit and Ramp shows that Anthropic enterprise sales growth is still rising, but the pace has slowed compared to the peak during the Claude Code boom. Smith doesn't shy away from this, characterizing it as a normal rhythm of the enterprise adoption cycle.

Product Strategy: Cowork Chasing Claude Code

At the product level, Smith provided an updated assessment of the competitive landscape for its two core products.

Claude Code achieved rapid internal penetration within organizations thanks to the high self-motivation of its developer community; while Claude Cowork, which is geared towards general scenarios, once outpaced Claude Code in its early growth, but its enterprise implementation path is more complex.

Smith explained:

Claude Code is used by a highly autonomous group of people, and software engineers can scale it extremely quickly, sweeping across the entire organization.

In contrast, Cowork's target users, such as knowledge workers like finance teams, legal departments, and researchers, require more customized integration support and a supporting partner ecosystem.

Smith said:

98% of enterprise users are not software engineers, and there are still many AI use cases to be explored in the enterprise sector.

He stated that Anthropic is continuously investing in enterprise-level features to meet the needs of large organizations in areas such as access control, data privacy, and role-based access.

On the IPO issue, Smith was cautious in his wording, declining to comment on the listing timeline, but emphasized that the listing would not change the company's operating logic. He said:

This is not the end, it's just an event. It will not change how we operate, and our mission and business operations will remain unchanged.

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