We understand the pain you feel after last month’s rout in the entire SaaS/cloud software complex of stocks.
In April 2026, Anthropic returned to strike, yet again, with a mysterious, new, powerful AI model, Mythos, that did not just ruffle feathers in the SaaS world. High-ranking US government officials, pressed for urgency, called for an immediate meeting with America’s top banks to discuss the risks of Anthropic’s Mythos. Along with Mythos, Anthropic also launched its own Managed Agents platform aimed directly at the agentic platforms of every SaaS company in the world.
This puts SaaS in unprecedented territory because Anthropic also revealed staggering exponential ARR growth of >4x in just 6 months. In other words, Anthropic is already demonstrating itself as an absolute beast of an AI beneficiary, while markets still wait for the long-expected AI inflection in the cloud software industry, raising skepticism in SaaS’s outlook on AI.
What really could also cook SaaS’s outlook is the rising risk of distressed debt in the software complex, which now looks even more pronounced in the view of the markets.
In February this year 2026, we noted how Anthropic and OpenAI’s agentic tools had forced a “paradigm shift” in SaaS by abstracting away software’s famed UI/UX user interface layer and collapsing the entire economic logic of software’s “per-seat licensing” pricing model.
In April 2026, the market’s paranoia about the “paradigm shift” in SaaS worsened after Anthropic released Mythos and the Managed Agents platform. Let’s unpack Anthropic’s Managed Agents first and talk about Mythos later.
In the past few months, almost every SaaS company has been waxing poetic about their game plan to retake the agentic AI TAM by launching agentic AI platforms. After all, the paradigm shift for SaaS was getting real, ruthless, and rapid. Because, for the first time ever, enterprises have to deal with only one line item of hidden costs in the agentic AI era—the cost of inference, a.k.a. tokens generated.
Unlike the extra (hidden) overhead of customizing and implementing SaaS for each enterprise and then training users of that enterprise to use that SaaS tool, enterprises now only have to deal with the cost of token generation & usage. Enterprises have begun to recognize this cost benefit and are changing how they prioritize their IT budgets. In their report, Menlo Ventures called enterprise AI “the fastest-scaling software category” in the history of software. And Anthropic/OpenAI had timed their pivot to the enterprise market to perfection.
Consequently, SaaS rushed to release agentic AI platforms. Salesforce $CRM launched Agentforce, ServiceNow $NOW launched Virtual Agent/Now Assist, and Workday $WDAY launched Workday Build. But that was just on the product side.
When such paradigm-shifting products, such as agentic AI platforms, are launched, they require completely new pricing plans and product packaging (bundling, feature gating) to be communicated to the enterprise customer base.
Therefore, while subscriptions and seat-based pricing still exist on a SaaS company’s product pricing menu, SaaS companies began rolling out consumption-based pricing. Germany’s SAP SE $SAP is the latest SaaS company to jump on the consumption-pricing bandwagon. With the shift to consumption or usage-based pricing, SaaS companies were attempting to round out their pivot to agentic AI platforms.
Then in April 2026, Anthropic launched Managed Agents, with the exact same agentic platform vision that was SaaS’s ticket to its highly awaited AI inflection. The Register wrote a splendid piece about how Anthropic’s Managed Agents make the process of building & deploying AI agents “more hands-off and more scalable” and how the Managed Agents remove a lot of the “complexity” in the agentic processes for the enterprise. In all honesty, Anthropic was probably just relentlessly pursuing its own product roadmap. But for the SaaS industry, Managed Agents turned out to be a problem.
Because it directly threatened the agentic platform roadmap of the whole industry. This was on top of a gut-wrenching Q1 of product launches from Anthropic that SaaS had to deal with in the past three months.
Also, it wasn’t just Anthropic’s relentless product strategy, which was at direct odds to the agentic AI roadmap of the entire SaaS industry. It was pricing too.
Anthropic recently lowered its seat-based pricing to $100/user/month on the Pro plan to appeal further to the enterprise market. Anthropic’s recent markdown in pricing was at odds with the seat-based pricing of the SaaS industry. For example, Salesforce’s minimum price per seat is $125/month for its Agentforce platform. Other SaaS vendors have now taken down their menu pricing but were also reported to have seat-based pricing that started from a minimum range of $75-100/user/month.
Anthropic’s Explosive Revenues Overshadow SaaS
At the begining of April 2026, The Information reported Anthropic’s ARR was ~$19B, “narrowing” the gap with OpenAI’s $25B.
Then, on the 07th of April 2026, Anthropic announced its ARR was at $30B, officially overtaking OpenAI. That implies a near-60% jump in ARR for Anthropic in the span of just 2 weeks. Not months. Not years. But in just 2 weeks. 60% growth !
The Information had also previously reported on Anthropic’s own internal estimates that project 70% gross margins next year. If Anthropic actually does that, it would imply an eye-watering 3000 basis point increase in gross margins versus 2025 for Anthropic.
The gross margin projection really hit a nerve in our outlook on SaaS.
In just 24 months, Anthropic was already planning to hit 70% margin levels, a key margin territory for SaaS companies, obliterating software’s famed Rule of 40 growth preamble.
Meanwhile, the median ARR growth of the SaaS complex sits at just 14% while gross margins are at 78%, according to data from Meritech Capital.
In conclusion, this combined update on skyrocketing growth and monumental margin expansion meant Anthropic wasn’t just winning TAM. It is also significantly capturing value away from SaaS companies.
In the meantime, OpenAI was beginning to sit up and notice Anthropic’s sway over the enterprise market.
