Why Anthropic Acts Like the SaaS It Threatens

Constellation Research’s Larry Dignan makes the case that Anthropic isn’t replacing SaaS vendors – it’s becoming one, while simultaneously embedding itself as an ingredient inside their products. Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Snowflake all run Claude under the hood now, giving Anthropic distribution without needing to build vertical software. Workday’s CEO pushed back on the disruption framing, arguing deterministic business processes don’t map cleanly onto probabilistic models. The tension is real though: Anthropic follows classic SaaS playbooks – recurring revenue, partner channels, vertical expansion into healthcare and finance – while controlling a reasoning layer that could eventually bypass the interfaces sitting on top of it. That dual positioning, partner and quiet threat, is becoming the default dynamic between foundation model companies and enterprise incumbents.