Buried in Anthropic’s IPO filing is what Russ Fradin, CEO of enterprise AI analytics firm Larridin, considers its most bullish revelation.
“Probably the single most bullish thing in the Anthropic S-1 is how little penetration they actually have among their customers today and how much room they have to grow,” Fradin told Benzinga.
More than half the Fortune 500 already spend at least $100,000 a year with Anthropic. Yet its revenue accounts for less than 0.1% of total expenses, on average, among qualifying publicly traded Fortune 500 customers, according to its filing.
Even its 10 largest Fortune 500 customers spend less than 1% of their expenses with Anthropic, more than eight times the broader average.
For Fradin, the opportunity is clear: Anthropic has won over many of America’s biggest companies, but captured only a fraction of their spending.
Corporate America Has Barely Started
Fradin said AI adoption varies enormously between companies.
He still speaks several times a week with businesses only beginning to experiment with AI coding tools. Others have embraced AI for software development but barely use it elsewhere.
At the other extreme, one Larridin customer with around 2,000 employees was using 75 different AI products.
Much of today’s corporate AI spending remains concentrated in software development. But Fradin believes coding alone cannot support the enormous valuations envisioned for Anthropic and OpenAI.
“It’s not two $2 trillion companies big,” he said.
For AI companies to reach that scale, their products need to become commonplace in sales, marketing, finance and other departments.
And Fradin sees encouraging signs once businesses begin adopting AI more widely.
“We see in our data once people start using the tools for more than three or four use cases, they don’t go back,” he said.
A Decade-Long Opportunity
Fradin believes AI could eventually account for more than 10% of the average company’s operating expenses, although he expects it to take another decade to reach that level.
“I think it’s going to take 10 years,” he said.
On Polymarket, traders assigned roughly 32% odds to Anthropic closing its IPO debut with a valuation between $1.5 trillion and $1.75 trillion, the leading bracket in a market with approximately $4.2 million traded as of Nov. 9.
The stakes are high for Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL). Anthropic has committed to spend at least $110 billion with Amazon through 2036 and $121.3 billion with Google’s cloud business through 2033, regardless of how much computing capacity it actually uses.
Both companies are also major Anthropic investors, giving them billions at stake in its valuation as well as its future cloud spending.
Fradin stressed that his bullish interpretation of the S-1 was his own assessment, not a finding from Larridin’s data.
“The fact that big enterprises pay you very little money does not mean you will be large in the future,” he cautioned. “Sometimes it means you’ll be small.”
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