Is Anthropic a SaaS Stock? Here's How It Stacks Up With the Other Top Software Players

Anthropic released its S-1 on Monday. The lengthy prospectus sets up the AI lab for what could be the biggest IPO ever, targeting a valuation of around $2 trillion.

The S-1 revealed a wide range of information about the company, including its quarterly results, financial statements, and risk factors, but one of the biggest questions facing the company is how to value it.

Anthropic is often referred to as an AI lab, a new kind of company that builds generative AI models and products such as chatbots. The only other peer in this category that's close to its size is OpenAI, and that company is not public yet, so it doesn't help much for valuation purposes.

Looking at the company's S-1 reveals that in a number of ways, Anthropic functions like a traditional software-as-a-service (SaaS) stock. It sells its products like Claude and Claude Code in monthly subscriptions, and while its products are chatbots, they're also a form of software.

Anthropic only uses the phrase "software-as-a-service" once in the S-1, but it's not to refer to itself. Instead, it refers to existing companies with which it may compete or increasingly compete in the future. However, the company uses metrics popular in the SaaS sector. For example, it shared with investors the number of customers it has at varying levels of annual recurring revenue (ARR). As of the end of the third quarter, Anthropic has more than 11,900 customers with an ARR of $10,000 or more, 1,900 with $1 million or more in ARR, and about 250 customers with $10 million or more in ARR.

Not every software company reports those metrics, but they almost certainly make Anthropic one of the biggest subscription software companies in the world.

Image source: Getty Images.

Is Anthropic a SaaS company?

Anthropic might not define itself as a SaaS company, but its statement about competing with software-as-a-service companies is telling.

Software stocks plunged in January after the company released a set of industry-specific plug-ins for Claude Cowork in areas like legal, finance, and sales, competing directly with traditional enterprise software companies.

We saw another example of this when the company introduced Claude Design and Figma, the design software stock, plunged on the news, as investors now saw Anthropic as a direct competitor.

Anthropic does have one major advantage over traditional software stocks. The company spends relatively little of its revenue on sales and marketing, while that tends to be the biggest line item for SaaS companies.

In the first half of 2026, less than 20% of its revenue went to sales, marketing, and partnerships, while compute and infrastructure made up its biggest line item and is expected to remain that way.

Anthropic's Claude suite of products is good enough that the company doesn't need an army of salespeople pitching the product. Claude sells itself. The company had 5,300 employees at the end of the third quarter, which is much fewer than software companies with comparable revenue. Salesforce, for example, has about 83,000 employees and brought in $41.5 billion in its last fiscal year, which is below Anthropic's run rate.

Should Anthropic be valued like a SaaS stock?

No other major sector earns valuations as high as the SaaS sector, where stocks often fetch price-to-sales ratios of 20 or higher, and many of these stocks aren't even profitable on a generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) basis.

Using a run rate based on its $16.8 billion in third-quarter revenue, Anthropic has annualized revenue of $67 billion, implying a price-to-sales ratio of around 30 at a valuation of $2 trillion. Some software stocks with a P/S ratio near that include Datadog at 25.4 and Snowflake at 21.9. Ironically, competition from Anthropic has suppressed software valuations, and many SaaS stocks traded at P/S ratios of 30 or higher during headier times like the pandemic.

Anthropic is growing much faster than those SaaS companies, though, with sequential revenue up nearly 50%.

Based on that growth rate, the fact that it's already profitable on an adjusted basis, and its disruptive potential, Anthropic looks cheap at a P/S ratio of 30.

While the stock has risks that SaaS stocks don't, like massive cloud spending commitments, comparing it to the typical software stock makes it look quite attractive.

Jeremy Bowman has positions in Figma. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Datadog, Figma, Salesforce, and Snowflake. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.