Anthropic’s stealth enterprise coup: How Claude 3.7 is changing into the coding agent of selection

Whereas client consideration has centered on the generative AI battles between OpenAI and Google, Anthropic has executed a disciplined enterprise technique centered on coding — probably probably the most precious enterprise AI use case. The outcomes have gotten more and more clear: Claude is positioning itself because the LLM that issues most for companies.

The proof? Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, launched simply two weeks in the past, set new benchmark data for coding efficiency. Concurrently, the corporate launched Claude Code, a command-line AI agent that helps builders construct purposes sooner. In the meantime, Cursor — an AI-powered code editor that defaults to Anthropic’s Claude mannequin — has surged to a reported $100 million in annual recurring income in simply 12 months. 

Anthropic’s deliberate deal with coding comes as enterprises more and more acknowledge the ability of AI coding brokers, which allow each seasoned builders and non-coders to construct purposes with unprecedented velocity and effectivity. “Anthropic continues to come out on top,” mentioned Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, one other fast-growing firm that lets builders, together with non-coders, deploy front-end purposes. Final yr, Vercel switched its lead coding mannequin from OpenAI’s GPT to Anthropic’s Claude after evaluating the fashions’ efficiency on key coding duties.

Claude 3.7: Setting new benchmarks for AI coding

Launched February 24, Claude 3.7 Sonnet leads on almost all coding benchmarks. It scored a formidable 70.3% on the revered SWE-bench benchmark, which measures an agent’s software program improvement abilities, handily outperforming nearest opponents OpenAI’s o1 (48.9%) and DeepSeek-R1 (49.2%). It additionally outperforms opponents on agentic duties.

Developer communities have rapidly verified these ends in real-world testing. Reddit threads evaluating Claude 3.7 with Grok 3, the newly launched mannequin from Elon Musk’s xAI, constantly favor Anthropic’s mannequin for coding duties. “Based on what I’ve tested, Claude 3.7 seems to be the best for writing code (at least for me),” mentioned a high commenter. (Replace: Even Manus, the brand new Chinese language multi-purpose agent that took the world by storm earlier this week, when it launched saying it was higher than Open AI’s Deep Analysis and different autonomous duties, was largely constructed on Claude.)

Alongside the three.7 Sonnet launch, Anthropic launched Claude Code, an AI coding agent that works instantly by means of the command line. This enhances the corporate’s October launch of Pc Use, which permits Claude to work together with a consumer’s laptop, together with utilizing a browser to look the net, opening purposes, and inputting textual content.

Most notable is what Anthropic hasn’t accomplished. In contrast to opponents that rush to match one another feature-for-feature, the corporate hasn’t even bothered to combine internet search performance into its app — a fundamental function most customers anticipate. This calculated omission alerts that Anthropic isn’t competing for normal shoppers however is laser-focused on the enterprise market, the place coding capabilities ship a lot greater ROI than search.

Fingers-on with Claude’s coding capabilities

To check the real-world capabilities of those coding brokers, I experimented with constructing a database to retailer VentureBeat articles utilizing three completely different approaches: Claude 3.7 Sonnet by means of Anthropic’s app; Cursor’s coding agent; and Claude Code.

Utilizing Claude 3.7 instantly by means of Anthropic’s app, I discovered the answer offered exceptional steering for a non-coder like myself. It really useful a number of choices, from very strong options utilizing issues like PostgreSQL database, to simpler, light-weight ones like utilizing Airtable. I selected the light-weight answer, and Claude methodically walked me by means of how one can pull articles from the VentureBeat API into Airtable utilizing Make.com for connections. The method took about two hours, together with some authentication challenges, however resulted in a practical system. You could possibly say that as an alternative of doing the entire code for me, it confirmed me a grasp plan on how to do it.

Cursor, which defaults to Claude’s fashions, is a full-fledged code editor and was extra wanting to automate the method. Nonetheless, it required permission at each step, making a considerably tedious workflow.

Claude Code provided yet one more method, operating instantly within the terminal and utilizing SQLite to create an area database that pulled articles from our RSS feed. This answer was easier and extra dependable by way of getting me to my finish aim, however undoubtedly much less strong and feature-rich than the Airtable implementation. I’m now understanding the character of those tradeoffs, and know that the coding agent I choose actually relies on the precise mission.

The important thing perception: At the same time as a non-developer, I used to be in a position to construct practical database purposes utilizing all three approaches — one thing that may have been unthinkable only a yr in the past. And so they all relied on Claude beneath the hood.

For a extra detailed overview of how to do that so-called “vibe coding,” the place you depend on brokers to code issues whereas not doing any coding your self, learn this nice piece by developer Simon Willison printed yesterday. The method will be very buggy, and irritating at instances, however with the best concessions to this, you possibly can go a good distance.

The technique: Why coding is Anthropic’s enterprise play

Anthropic’s singular deal with coding capabilities isn’t unintentional. In keeping with projections reportedly leaked to The Info, Anthropic goals to attain $34.5 billion in income by 2027 — an 86-fold enhance from present ranges. Roughly 67% of this projected income would come from API enterprise, with enterprise coding purposes as the first driver. Whereas Anthropic hasn’t launched precise numbers for its income to date, it mentioned its coding income surged 1,000% over the past quarter of 2024. Final week, Anthropic introduced it had raised $3.5 billion extra in funding at a $61.5 billion valuation.

This coding wager is supported by Anthropic’s personal Financial Index, which discovered that 37.2% of queries despatched to Claude had been within the “computer and mathematical” class, primarily masking software program engineering duties like code modification, debugging and community troubleshooting.

Anthropic seems to be marching to its personal beat — at a time when opponents are distracted, speeding to cowl each enterprise and client markets with function parity. OpenAI’s lead is strengthened from its early client recognition and utilization, and it’s caught making an attempt to serve each common customers and companies with a number of fashions and performance. Google is chasing this pattern too, making an attempt to have one in all every thing.

Anthropic’s comparatively disciplined technique extends to its product selections. As an alternative of chasing client market share, the corporate has prioritized enterprise options like GitHub integration, audit logs, customizable permissions and domain-specific safety controls. Six months in the past, it launched a large 500,000-token context window for builders, whereas Google restricted its 1-million-token window to personal testers. The result’s a complete coding-focused providing that enterprises are more and more adopting.

The corporate lately launched options permitting non-coders to publish AI-created purposes inside their organizations, and simply final week upgraded its console with enhanced collaboration capabilities, together with shareable prompts and templates. This democratization displays a form of Trojan Horse technique: First allow builders to construct highly effective foundations, then develop entry to the broader enterprise workforce, together with up into the company suite.

The coding agent ecosystem: Cursor and past

Maybe probably the most telling signal of Anthropic’s success is the explosive progress of Cursor, an AI code editor that reportedly has 360,000 customers, with greater than 40,000 of them paying clients, after simply 12 months — making it presumably the quickest SaaS firm to achieve that milestone.

Cursor’s success is inextricably linked to Claude. “You’ve got to think their number one customer is Cursor,” famous Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Purple Dragon, an impartial developer of AI brokers. “Most people on [Cursor] were using the Claude Sonnet model — the 3.5 models — already. And now it seems everyone’s just migrating over to 3.7.”

The connection between Anthropic and its ecosystem extends past particular person corporations like Cursor. In November, Anthropic launched its Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP) as an open normal, permitting builders to construct instruments that work together with Claude fashions. The usual is being broadly adopted by builders.

“By launching this as an open protocol, they’re form of saying, ‘Hey, everyone, have at it,’” explained Witteveen. “You can develop whatever you want that fits this protocol. We’re going to help this protocol.”

This method creates a virtuous cycle: Builders construct instruments for Claude, which makes Claude extra precious to enterprises, which drives extra adoption, which attracts extra builders.

The competitors: Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and open supply

Whereas Anthropic has discovered its focus, opponents are pursuing completely different methods with various outcomes.

Microsoft maintains vital momentum by means of its GitHub Copilot, which has 1.3 million paid customers and has been adopted by greater than 77,000 organizations in roughly two years. Corporations like Honeywell, State Road, TD Financial institution Group and Levi’s are amongst its customers. This widespread adoption stems largely from Microsoft’s present enterprise relationships and its first-mover benefit, whereby it invested early into OpenAI and used that firm’s fashions to energy Copilot.

Nonetheless, even Microsoft has acknowledged Anthropic’s energy. In October, it allowed GitHub Copilot customers to decide on Anthropic’s fashions as a substitute for OpenAI. And OpenAI’s current fashions — o1 and the newer o3, which emphasize reasoning by means of prolonged pondering — haven’t demonstrated explicit strengths in coding or agentic duties.

Google has made its personal play by lately making its Code Help free, however this transfer appears extra defensive than strategic.

The open supply motion is one other vital power on this panorama. Meta’s Llama fashions have gained substantial enterprise traction, with main corporations like AT&T, DoorDash and Goldman Sachs deploying Llama-based fashions for varied purposes. The open-source method affords enterprises higher management, customization choices and price advantages that closed fashions can’t match, as VentureBeat reported final yr.

Somewhat than seeing this as a direct menace, Anthropic seems to be positioning itself as complementary to open supply. Enterprise clients can use Claude alongside open-source fashions relying on particular wants, a hybrid method that maximizes the strengths of every.

In actual fact, most enterprise corporations of scale I’ve talked with over the previous a number of months are explicitly multimodal, in that their AI workflows enable them to make use of no matter mannequin is greatest for a given case. Intuit was an early instance of an organization that had wager on OpenAI as a default for its tax return purposes, however then final yr switched to Claude as a result of it was superior in some circumstances. The ache of switching led Intuit to create an AI orchestration framework that allowed switching between fashions to be far more seamless, as Nhung Ho, Intuit’s VP of AI, advised VentureBeat on the time.

Most different enterprise corporations have since adopted an identical apply. They use no matter mannequin is greatest for the precise case, pulling in fashions with easy API calls. In some circumstances, an open-source mannequin like Llama would possibly work properly, however in others — for instance, in calculations the place accuracy is necessary — Claude is the selection, Intuit’s Ho defined at VentureBeat’s VB Rework occasion final yr. 

Over the previous couple of days, I’ve been attending the HumanX convention in Las Vegas, the place lots of of builders gathered to speak about AI. Claude comes up nearly at all times every time the subject of brokers or coding is raised. Over lunch yesterday, Julianne Averill, managing director at Danforth Advisors, which advises life science corporations, mentioned her firm had discovered Claude superior for a lot of such duties, together with constructing structured evaluation tables.

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, one other attendee, mentioned his firm, which has surpassed $100 million in annual income, selected Claude final yr as its default mannequin to assist builders code after doing rigorous evaluations of all fashions. “3.7 is king,” Rauch advised VentureBeat. He agreed it’s necessary to supply builders a selection of fashions, because the breakneck tempo of advances means there can’t be loyalty to a single mannequin. However whereas Vercel’s V0 product, which lets customers generate internet consumer interfaces (UIs) utilizing natural-language prompts, affords that selection, it has to choose a default mannequin to assist customers throughout their preliminary ideation and reasoning part. That mannequin is Claude Sonnet. “You need the architect model that is capable of reasoning and does the lion’s share of code generation,” he mentioned. “A significant chunk of our pipeline is powered by Anthropic Sonnet.” Adobe, Chick-Fil-A and Mattress Bathtub and Past are Vercel’s clients. 

Nonetheless Rauch cautioned that fluidity within the LLM race stays, and the lead mannequin may change at any time. Vercel experimented with China’s DeepSeek, he mentioned, however discovered it fell simply wanting matching Claude’s Sonnet. Equally, he mentioned, Alibaba’s Qwen mannequin has gotten excellent.

Enterprise implications: Making the shift to coding brokers

For enterprise decision-makers, this quickly evolving panorama presents each alternatives and challenges.

Safety stays a high concern, however a current impartial report discovered Claude 3.7 Sonnet to be probably the most safe mannequin but — the one one examined that proved “jailbreak-proof.” This safety stance, mixed with Anthropic’s backing from each Google and Amazon (and integration into AWS Bedrock), positions it properly for enterprise adoption.

The rise of coding brokers isn’t simply altering how purposes are constructed — it’s democratizing the method. In keeping with GitHub, 92% of U.S.-based builders at enterprise corporations had been already utilizing AI-powered coding instruments at work 18 months in the past. That quantity has seemingly grown considerably since then.

“The challenge that people are having [because of] not being a coder is really that they don’t know a lot of the terminology. They don’t know best practices,” defined Witteveen. AI coding brokers more and more bridge this hole, permitting technical and non-technical crew members to collaborate extra successfully.

For enterprise adoption, Witteveen recommends a balanced method: “It’s the balance between security and experimentation at the moment. Clearly, on the developer side, people are starting to build real-world apps with this stuff.”

For a deeper exploration of those points, take a look at my current YouTube video dialog with Witteveen, the place we take a deep dive into the state of coding brokers and what they imply for enterprise AI technique.

Trying forward: the way forward for enterprise coding

The rise of AI coding brokers alerts a basic shift in enterprise software program improvement. When used successfully, these instruments don’t exchange builders however remodel their roles, permitting them to deal with structure and innovation somewhat than implementation particulars.

Anthropic’s disciplined method in focusing particularly on coding capabilities whereas opponents chase a number of priorities seems to be paying dividends for the corporate. By the tip of 2025, we could look again on this era because the second when AI coding brokers grew to become important enterprise instruments — with Claude main the way in which.

For technical decision-makers, the message is evident: Begin experimenting with these instruments now or threat falling behind opponents who’re already utilizing them to speed up improvement cycles dramatically. This second echoes the early days of the iPhone revolution, when corporations initially tried to dam “unsanctioned” units from their company networks, solely to finally embrace BYOD insurance policies as worker demand grew to become overwhelming. Some corporations VentureBeat has talked with, like Honeywell, have lately equally tried to close down “rogue” use of AI coding instruments not accredited by IT. 

Talking Monday on the HumanX convention, James Reggio, the CTO of Brex, an organization that gives bank cards and different monetary providers to small and mid-sized enterprises, mentioned his firm initially additionally tried to implement a top-down method to AI mannequin choice, in an effort to achieve perfection. However the firm confronted revolt amongst its developer staff, and shortly realized this was futile. It determined to permit customers to experiment freely. Sensible corporations are already organising safe sandbox environments to permit managed experimentation. Organizations that create clear guardrails whereas encouraging innovation will profit from each worker enthusiasm and insights about how these instruments can greatest serve their distinctive wants — positioning themselves forward of opponents who resist change. And Anthropic’s Claude, at the least for now, is an enormous beneficiary of this motion.

Watch my video with developer Sam Witteveen right here for a full deep dive into the coding agent pattern: