Anthropic's new Claude Enterprise spend-tracking tools, explained
Anthropic has made smart reports, pooled budgets and in-app surveys generally available for Claude Enterprise, giving admins more detail on what their AI spending produces.
Spending on AI coding tools is rising fast. Jellyfish, which makes tools for software developers, released a report based on agentic coding tool use by 276,000 of its customers. It found that spending on Claude Code and other tools built on Anthropic models has grown tenfold since the start of the year, with their cost now equal to about 2% of total engineering cost. As Jellyfish chief scientist Nicholas Arcolano put it, "that 10x growth is growth that most CFOs didn't plan for."
Anthropic has now made three features, released in beta in September, generally available for Claude Enterprise plans: smart reports, pooled budgets and in-app surveys. They are meant to give enterprise customers a more granular view of what their token spend produces. TechCrunch calls it a clear attempt to demonstrate the return on investment of Anthropic's tools, a major concern among large customers.
What Claude's smart reports actually track
Smart reports show what tasks employees are using Claude for, how often they run them and what they cost, over a given date range. They also document "where sessions run into friction," according to Anthropic, and note where routine workflows could be created from tasks people run consistently. The reports are off by default, and Anthropic says it won't use this data for model training by default. Anthropic's documentation states that smart reports "aren't designed and should not be used for evaluating individual performance or making employment decisions," a relevant disclaimer given how AI is affecting HR.
Pooled budgets and in-app surveys give admins finer controls
Pooled budgets set a monthly spend cap for a group within an organisation, on top of each seat's individual monthly limit. Admins can set individual and group limits based on previous monthly spend data. The aim is that one highly active user is not held back by a budget limit while others leave spend unused. Users can belong to multiple pooled budgets, ordered by priority. With in-app surveys, admins can create surveys that appear in Chat to ask employees about their Claude usage, and see aggregate responses in the Admin console.
Which plans get these features, and what they cost
All three features are for Claude Enterprise plans. ZDNET notes that Claude Enterprise is much pricier than a Claude Teams account: Enterprise is billed at $20 per seat per month in addition to API token rates. Teams also charges $20 per seat but caps out at 150 users and includes tokens, so usage isn't billed separately, which makes it more accessible to smaller teams. ZDNET adds that a company already spending at enterprise level can likely afford it, but the stakes on that spend are higher, and the new tools may surface insights that persuade larger customers who are getting antsy to stay.
What a buyer should weigh when assessing Claude Enterprise ROI tools
Claude Code and other Anthropic-based tools account for nearly a third of all proposed code changes submitted for review in Jellyfish's data, and the release of OpenAI's Astra model this summer has not slowed Anthropic's adoption numbers so far. Jellyfish AI product lead Nikolas Albarran said Codex has started to show up in its data with Astra, but that many organisations have standardised workflows around Anthropic's tools and see no big enough reason to switch. Once a company has made that effort, he said, the cost to switch is not zero. TechCrunch describes the new reporting tools as a lighter version of the hands-on help AI labs offer through forward-deployed engineering teams. Buyers should also weigh the wider picture. Most of the Fortune 500 are not seeing major gains from deploying AI, according to TechCrunch. ZDNET reports that OpenAI has caught up with Anthropic in enterprise AI in recent months, and that Ramp data shows Anthropic spend peaked in July and has been slightly lower in October so far. On Anthropic's side, the financials it shared with investors this week show 900% net revenue retention, meaning spending from the same customers grew nine times between Q3 2025 and Q3 2026.