Anthropic’s Chief Business Officer, Paul Smith, explicitly stated that the company will not compete on price, instead focusing on unlocking value for enterprise customers and planning to complete a $15 billion credit facility prior to its IPO, led by Morgan Stanley. The company has chosen to differentiate itself from OpenAI’s pricing strategy by emphasizing value creation for clients rather than price competition. Over the past year, its sales team has tripled in size, and annualized revenue has grown more than tenfold. Claude Code has achieved rapid adoption thanks to strong self-motivation among developers, but Smith noted that 98% of enterprise users are not software engineers, leaving significant untapped AI use cases in the enterprise sector. The IPO will not alter the company’s operational logic.

Article author and source: Wall Street Journal

On September 3, Bloomberg, citing informed sources, reported that Anthropic is poised to complete a $15 billion credit facility before its IPO, led by Morgan Stanley, with major roles played by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup, and participation from Barclays and Wells Fargo.

The scale of this funding round underscores strong external confidence in the company’s prospects for going public. Paul Smith, Chief Business Officer at Anthropic, said in a recent interview:

I have no interest in buying market share through price cuts; I’d rather focus on customers and how they can extract maximum value from the model.

Analysis suggests that this statement is a response to OpenAI's multiple reductions in model pricing this summer.

Pricing stance: Prioritize value; refuse to follow price cuts.

This summer, OpenAI successively lowered the prices of multiple AI models, a move widely seen as an effort to respond to pricing pressures from developers in the U.S. and China. In contrast, Anthropic, currently recognized as the market benchmark for capability, chose a completely different path.

Paul Smith has been with Anthropic for over a year, leading the company’s enterprise sales strategy. He clearly states that the core of the pricing strategy is customer value. Paul Smith says:

This isn't about price cuts or anything else—it's about creating value for customers.

Just days after the interview ended, Anthropic released the new model Fable 5.1, which emphasizes programming and scientific task capabilities, priced the same as the previous version.

However, the company moderately reduced user costs in specific cases where the model invoked previously processed information.

The input and output prices for Fable 5.1 remain unchanged, but the cached read price has decreased by 75%. According to Anthropic’s estimates, the overall cost for typical workloads is approximately 25% lower than Fable 5, with costs for complex coding and highly agent-intensive tasks reduced by up to 45%.

For Anthropic and OpenAI, the aggressiveness of their pricing strategies could become a key variable in their paths toward going public over the coming months.

Business Growth: From Rapid Expansion to Refined Operations

Over the past year, Smith expanded Anthropic’s sales team to three times its original size, and the company’s annualized revenue forecast grew more than tenfold during the same period.

From the perspective of enterprise adoption pathways, Smith describes a typical two-stage pattern. In the initial stage, companies tend to grant broad access and encourage employees to widely experiment with AI tools to overcome organizational inertia; subsequently, they begin to tighten control, precisely managing how different roles and functions use AI tools and allocate budgets.

Smith says:

In nearly all cases, they continue to grow, continue to increase their investment in Anthropic, and continue to use more Claude; however, in this new phase, their usage has become more controlled—this is simply a natural maturation process within organizational learning, and the overall growth trajectory remains strong.

Recent data from Yipit and Ramp shows that Anthropic’s enterprise sales growth continues to rise, but at a slower pace than during the peak of the Claude Code surge. Smith does not shy away from this, characterizing it as a normal rhythm in the enterprise adoption cycle.

Product Overview: Claude Code vs. Claude Cowork

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

Claude Code achieved rapid internal adoption within organizations due to the high self-motivation of its developer community, while Claude Cowork, designed for general-purpose use, although initially growing faster than Claude Code, faces a more complex enterprise deployment path.

Smith explained:

Users of Claude Code are a highly autonomous group; software engineers can rapidly scale and transform the entire organization.

In contrast, Cowork’s target users—such as finance teams, legal departments, and researchers—require more customized integration support and a robust partner ecosystem.

Smith says:

98% of enterprise users are not software engineers, and there are still many AI use cases waiting to be unlocked on the enterprise side.

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

On the topic of an IPO, Smith was cautious in his wording, declining to comment on the timing of the listing, but emphasized that the listing would not alter the company’s operational logic. He said:

This is not the end, just an event—it will not change how we operate. Our mission and the way we run our business remain unchanged.