In recent years, an abundance of new AI tools has hit the market. Anthropic's AI model, Claude, stands out not just for its power and capabilities, but also for its robust safety measures – which have helped build a high level of trust with its users.

The Anthropic team wanted to monetise Claude while reserving its team members' time for product development. So, the company turned to Stripe to provide billing and payments infrastructure.

Building and growing with Stripe

Anthropic's efforts to monetise Claude began well before the product's 2023 launch. The company first made Claude available to business and enterprise customers, and called on Stripe to establish the initial billing and payment process. Anthropic used Stripe Payments to collect payments from enterprise users. It also used Stripe Invoicing, a no-code platform that enabled the company to easily create and send invoices, automate accounts receivable, collect payments and reconcile transactions.

When Anthropic readied Claude for its public release, the company knew it also needed a more comprehensive customer-facing billing and payment system. Again, it looked to Stripe to help provide the tools to build out a subscription model, where users would pay a flat monthly fee for different levels of access. Stripe Billing enabled Anthropic to easily build those subscription tiers with minimal engineering time and gave the company the flexibility to adjust its subscription model to meet the needs of its users.

Optimising checkout and expanding payment options

Claude's growing user base also required expanding the payment and checkout process. Anthropic used Stripe's Optimized Checkout Suite to improve its checkout flow and offer a wider range of payment methods.

The Optimized Checkout Suite includes Stripe Elements, a set of embeddable UI components that allowed Anthropic to easily offer payment options, including credit cards, digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Cash App Pay and local payment methods that would appeal to the company's increasingly international user base.

Anthropic also turned on Link, a wallet built by Stripe, that enables customers to check out faster with their preferred payment method. With Link, Anthropic customers have the option to pay with their saved card or US bank account. Link is very popular among its customers, with 80% of them choosing to pay with Link when it's available.

Scaling data infrastructure to support rapid growth

As Anthropic quickly grew, the complexity of its financial operations soon outpaced its existing data infrastructure. The company previously relied on an extract, transform and load (ETL) pipeline to send Stripe data to its Google BigQuery data warehouse. However, surging transaction volumes caused the system to frequently hit API rate limits, leading to data delays and requiring daily manual checks.

Seeking a solution that could more easily handle growing demand, Anthropic adopted Stripe Data Pipeline. With Data Pipeline, Anthropic now automatically syncs its Stripe data into Google Cloud Storage (GCS) and then forwards it to BigQuery. The setup took one engineer less than a week and the team immediately saw improvements in data reliability.

"We were able to ingest all of our Stripe data without burning through API quotas and rate limits. Data Pipeline also delivers data in industry standard formats, making it easy to ingest directly into our data warehouse," said Akshay Joshi, software engineer at Anthropic.

Enhancing data management and financial reporting

With all of its Stripe data now flowing reliably, Anthropic built a custom revenue recognition engine within BigQuery. Hundreds of data build tool (DBT) models in its data warehouse now combine Stripe and other business data, applying complex accounting rules to calculate auditable entries for every transaction. This data is transformed into structured datasets and key financial reports, then aggregated for posting to its ERP.

The combination of Data Pipeline with its DBT models streamlined Anthropic's financial workflows, enabling month-end reconciliation to start six days faster. Most importantly, Anthropic achieved significantly higher data integrity – key for auditable financial records and accurate reporting of important metrics for leadership and investors.

Driving conversion and managing risk

Anthropic's implementation of the Optimized Checkout Suite helped drive conversion rates higher, due in large part to its use of dynamic payment methods. And the company's use of Link has been adopted widely – with more than two in three Anthropic customers using Link accounts. And among those users, 80% use Link at checkout when it's available.

Anthropic also uses Payments analytics for a complete, data-driven view of its payments lifecycle, from checkout to disputes. This allows the team to move beyond top-level metrics to diagnose the root cause of declines, analyse dispute trends and strategically balance the trade-offs between authorisation, fraud and costs to maximise revenue. The company uses Stripe's robust Dashboard reporting capabilities to understand network costs.

In addition, Anthropic used Stripe's risk scoring to create custom rules in Radar for Fraud Teams that would maximise revenue from legitimate transactions while still protecting against fraud. After incorporating those rules, Anthropic saw an 83% reduction in the number of legitimate transactions that were incorrectly blocked.

Supporting Anthropic's growth today – and tomorrow

Looking forward, Stripe is working with Anthropic to more easily manage operations in multiple regions. That includes Anthropic using Stripe Organizations, which helps centralise and simplify financial reporting – providing consolidated reports across accounts. That level of visibility across the organisation can help users boost efficiency and reduce operational overhead.