Anthropic’s S-1, filed on October 26, reports net revenue retention of approximately 900% as of September 30, 2026, and says that consumption-based billing made up 80% of its revenue in the first half of the year.
What the filing says about pricing
The filing calls its main revenue model “pay-for-intelligence”: customers pay for usage metered in tokens and priced by the model they choose. Consumption-based revenue rose from $288 million, or 75% of total revenue, in 2024 to $3.8 billion, or 83%, in 2025. For the six months ended June 30, 2026 it was $13.1 billion, or 80% of a total of $16.3 billion. Subscriptions for enterprises and individuals make up the rest, with terms of 12 months or less.
The filing also describes how the two models connect. When subscribers reach the usage included in their tier, they can move to a higher tier or buy more intelligence directly, which the company calls a bridge from subscription to incremental pay-for-intelligence revenue. A growing number of enterprise customers sign non-cancelable annual or multi-year contracts with minimum spend commitments in exchange for a committed price list. Those contracts produce mostly consumption-based revenue, so the commitment is a floor and the usage above it is the growth.
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How the retention number is built
Net Revenue Retention in the filing divides a group of customers’ revenue in the current three-month period by the same customers’ revenue in the three months a year earlier. A customer has to have paid at least $1 in the base period to count, and subscribers to the Claude Pro and Max plans are left out because, in the company’s words, fixed-price subscriptions do not reflect expansion and contraction behavior.
That definition matters for anyone comparing it with a seat-based software company’s figure. The 900% describes revenue from existing usage customers growing ninefold in a year. The filing ties it to price as well as volume. It says Claude Opus 5.5 reduced customer costs per task by approximately 40% compared with Claude Opus 5, and states: “Lower costs per task drive greater usage, which in turn drives broader diffusion of Claude.” The same section gives the customer counts as of September 30: more than 11,900 customers with $100,000 or more of trailing twelve-month revenue, more than 1,900 with $1 million or more, and approximately 250 with $10 million or more.
Where the sales money goes
The expense table shows sales, marketing, and partnerships spending of $3,168 million in the first half of 2026, against $120 million in the same period of 2025. The filing says this was 19% of revenue. Its description of the line is specific: the expenses primarily consist of fees paid to channel partners and marketing and advertising costs, including media and public relations spend. Personnel sits on its own line, at $3,152 million for the half.
The line grew 26-fold in a year, and the filing’s own definition points to partner fees first. Claude is available on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, and the company has “a joint go-to-market approach with these CSPs through which we establish direct contractual relationships with our customers while paying a fee to each CSP.” It says that structure lets it avoid channel conflict and set pricing. System integrators Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG and PwC, and data platforms Salesforce and Snowflake, are named as other routes to customers.
The filing also says the company relies substantially on organic adoption rather than a large direct sales organization, and that it has grown, and will continue to grow, its direct sales force. It adds that it has limited experience building and managing a sales organization.
What it means for the sales leader
For a revenue team selling any usage-priced product, the filing gives three working definitions to borrow. The first is a retention metric that excludes fixed-price plans, so expansion is measured only where spend can move. The second is a commitment structure with a minimum spend and a committed price list, which lets a customer’s finance team approve a floor while the usage above it produces the growth. The third is a channel arrangement in which the vendor holds the contract and the cloud marketplace takes a fee, which keeps the price in the vendor’s hands.
Each of those changes who owns the number. If expansion comes from usage, the account executive who closed the contract may not control it, and customer success, solution engineering and the product itself all share the result. We have written about vendors that pitch outcomes as the product, where the price has to follow the result the customer gets. On the channel side, the filing names Salesforce as a data-platform partner, and we reported its agreement to acquire Braze earlier this month.
In our reading, the most transferable detail is the exclusion rule. A retention figure that mixes fixed-price and metered customers hides which accounts are growing, and a sales leader who reports one blended number cannot tell a renewal from an expansion.
What to check in your own book
Pull your own last four quarters of recurring revenue for every customer, split fixed-fee from usage-linked accounts, and compute retention for the two groups separately. Then check how your compensation plan credits the usage group, because quota credit that stops at signature leaves the growth uncredited. The same split shows which accounts grew because the customer used more and which only renewed at the same size. Finally, list every partner fee that sits between your list price and your booked revenue, and write down which team approves changes to it.
Source: Anthropic, PBC Form S-1 (SEC)
