Anthropic Built for Coders, Winning With Everyone Else
Anthropic's Chief Commercial Officer Paul Smith has a message for developers: Claude Code was always going to be the smaller market. In an interview with Bloomberg published April 1, Smith said Anthropic has seen stronger adoption for Cowork — the company's non-developer-facing desktop agent — in its first few weeks than it did during a comparable period for Claude Code a year ago. Cowork, he said, is "more likely to appeal to the rest of us." The 95 to 98 percent of knowledge workers who do not write code for a living, in other words, are the real prize.
The irony buried in that interview is hard to miss. Two days earlier, on March 31, the source code for Claude Code appeared on GitHub. The leak was not a breach, Smith said, but a process error tied to a missing .npmignore file that shipped a 59.8-megabyte source map containing 512,000 lines of unobfuscated TypeScript, per Layer5's technical analysis. Anthropic's DMCA takedown notice swept approximately 8,100 repositories, per the official GitHub DMCA filing, before the company retracted the bulk of it, limiting the action to a single repository and 96 forks, per TechCrunch. Meanwhile, a clean-room rewrite of Claude Code called Claw Code accumulated 50,000 GitHub stars in roughly two hours, reaching more than 55,800 stars and 58,200 forks by April 1, per Layer5. The demand signal Anthropic is now calling the smaller market was visible in real time: developers were not waiting for a waitlist.
Claude Code launched in early 2025 as a research preview before general availability. By February 2026, the product had reached $1 billion in annualized recurring revenue in just six months, per Anthropic's own announcement. That same month Anthropic disclosed that run-rate revenue had grown to over $2.5 billion, more than doubling since the start of the year, on the strength of enterprise contracts that account for roughly 80 percent of that figure. The company acquired Bun, the JavaScript runtime, in a deal Anthropic characterized as partly a talent acquisition to support the product. Cowork, by contrast, has no disclosed revenue figure. Smith's claim is directional: the trajectory is steeper, not the absolute number.
Cowork launched January 12, 2026 as a research preview for Max subscribers at $100 to $200 per month, per SentiSight. Access expanded to Pro subscribers at $20 per month on January 16, and to Team and Enterprise plans on January 23, per Jagran Josh. Enterprise plugins connecting to Google Drive, Gmail, DocuSign, and FactSet entered research preview on January 30, per Axios. The product does not require users to open a terminal or type command-line instructions, a design choice that explicitly separates it from Claude Code's developer-oriented interface, per NDTV.
Anthropic's revenue context adds stakes to the positioning. The company is reportedly weighing an IPO as early as October 2026, targeting a raise north of $60 billion, per The Tech Portal. That followed a $30 billion Series G closed in February at a $380 billion post-money valuation, per Anthropic's announcement. Revenue run rate reportedly grew from approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025 to nearly $20 billion by early March, per Bloomberg.
Smith's framing is a rational market segmentation argument. The execution data he cited is directional, not an audited metric. What is harder to dispute is that the developer market Anthropic is calling the smaller one was large enough to generate over $2.5 billion in annualized revenue in roughly twelve months and large enough that thousands of developers immediately tried to obtain the source code when it became available. Whether the non-developer mass market that Cowork targets produces comparable revenue per user is the open question Anthropic is reportedly betting $60 billion in IPO proceeds on.
The source code leak remains unresolved in terms of competitive impact. A missing configuration file in an npm package release shipped what a technical analysis described as the full internal source map. Anthropic has not disclosed what specific intellectual property the source map exposed. The company characterized the incident as a rapid-release-cycle error, not a breach. The distinction matters legally. Whether it matters competitively depends on what engineers who received a 512,000-line unobfuscated TypeScript codebase actually do with it.
† Add a source citation for the 80% figure, or add a footnote: "Source-reported; not independently verified." If no source exists, revise to remove the specific percentage.