According to Forbes, Uber’s adoption of Anthropic’s Claude AI has saved the company an estimated 200 years of developer work, with the ride-hailing giant now using Claude-powered tools to review over 90% of its weekly code changes. Anthropic has seen explosive growth in its enterprise business, reaching $7 billion in revenue this year and reportedly on track to hit $9 billion in annualized revenue by end of 2025. The company now has 300,000 enterprise customers, up from just 1,000 two years ago, with Claude Code hitting $500 million in annualized revenue just three months after its May launch. Over 60% of Anthropic’s business customers now use more than one Claude product, driving what Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger calls a “land and expand” strategy that’s making enterprise clients the core of their business, accounting for 80% of revenue.
The Uber domino effect
Here’s the thing about enterprise AI adoption – it often starts with engineers just trying to get their work done faster. Uber’s CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga noticed his team was using Claude for coding tasks, tried it himself, and the rest is history. What began as engineers using Claude for bug fixes and code migration evolved into building custom tools like uReviewer, which now handles the majority of Uber’s code review workload. That’s the “virtuous cycle” Anthropic’s head of Americas describes – once engineers see value, they build more tools, and suddenly AI is embedded throughout the organization. Basically, engineers become the internal evangelists that drive broader adoption.
Why enterprise is the smarter play
Anthropic’s hyperfocus on enterprise customers looks increasingly brilliant when you compare their trajectory to OpenAI’s. While OpenAI will hit $20 billion in annualized revenue this year, only about 30% comes from enterprise – the rest is from consumers who can be fickle and expensive to acquire. Enterprise contracts are stickier, more predictable, and frankly more lucrative. As one analyst put it, “That’s where the money is going to be made.” The financials bear this out – Anthropic expects to break even in 2028, while OpenAI reportedly faces $74 billion in operating costs that same year. When you’re dealing with massive infrastructure investments, that enterprise revenue stability matters.
Coding as the Trojan horse
The real insight from Anthropic’s strategy is that coding tools have become the perfect entry point for enterprise AI. Claude Code’s rapid $500 million revenue run-rate shows how hungry developers are for these tools. Think about it – engineers are naturally technical, they understand what AI can and can’t do, and they’re constantly looking for ways to automate repetitive tasks. Once they experience real productivity gains with coding assistance, they start thinking about other applications. That’s exactly what happened at Uber, and apparently at thousands of other companies too. It’s a much more organic adoption path than top-down corporate mandates.
What this means for the AI wars
We’re seeing a fascinating divergence in AI business models. OpenAI is going for the consumer brand play while Anthropic is laser-focused on enterprise solutions. According to Menlo Ventures’ research, Anthropic has already become the most popular vendor in the $8.4 billion enterprise language model market. Their forward-deployed engineers – developers embedded with clients to customize AI models – represent a level of enterprise service that consumer-focused companies can’t match. And when you look at companies building serious industrial applications, whether it’s manufacturing systems or logistics platforms, having reliable enterprise-grade AI tools becomes critical. The companies that get this right will dominate the next decade of business technology.
