Anthropic has made three tools generally available for Claude Enterprise that are meant to show companies what their spending on Claude actually produces: smart reports, in-app surveys and pooled group budgets. The announcement, published on 28 October, says smart reports analyse a sample of a team’s conversations and group the work into “workstreams”, each with its spend, deliverables and common points of friction.
According to Anthropic’s help centre, each organisation can run up to 10 reports a month at no charge, with the allowance resetting on the first of the month. The launch follows Anthropic’s move to put Claude chat and Cowork in a single enterprise app, and lands as large customers ask harder questions about what their AI bills buy.
In brief
- Smart reports show what a team does with Claude, what it costs and where tools fail, with suggested workflows to reuse.
- In-app surveys ask staff what Claude has changed; pooled budgets give a team one shared monthly limit.
- Reports are off by default, and individual names are hidden unless an owner switches attribution on.
How smart reports work
An admin picks a team, a date range and the Claude products to include. Claude then reads a sample of that team’s transcripts and sorts the work into workstreams. Anthropic says each report has one list of recommendations, such as recurring tasks to turn into skills or rules to add to a code repository, and can answer custom questions about model usage and cost. If a spend limit is holding someone back, an admin with billing rights can raise it from the report.
The help centre adds the operating details. The feature is switched off by default and must be turned on by an Owner or Primary Owner in the organisation’s settings. A report can cover up to the last 28 days, takes a few hours to produce, and can be downloaded as HTML or shared by link. Owners can also let team leads who are not admins run reports for their own groups, according to a separate help article.
Smart reports are not available for organisations with customer-managed encryption keys, HIPAA configurations or hybrid deployments. Where zero data retention is on for Claude Code, reports leave Claude Code out.
Surveys and shared budgets
In-app surveys appear as a short card after a reply, inside the tool a person is already using. The default questions ask for the most valuable thing someone has done with Claude recently, how it changed the time that work took, and what would break first if the team lost access tomorrow. Admins can edit the questions and export responses to a spreadsheet.
Pooled group budgets give a group one shared monthly budget, so heavy users are less likely to run out early while colleagues leave budget unused. Individual limits still apply, and a request counts against both. Admins with billing permissions get email alerts at 50%, 75%, 95% and 100% of a budget. The pooled budgets help article says that when a pool runs out, usage pauses for every member.
Privacy limits on reading staff conversations
A tool that reads samples of employees’ chats with an AI system raises obvious questions about workplace monitoring, and Anthropic has built in several limits. Its announcement says smart reports “aren’t for evaluating individual performance or making employment decisions”. The help centre says the setting that allows attribution to individual users is off by default, so drilldowns show a generic “User”, and that revealing names is logged.
Some subjects are handled more strictly still. The help centre lists restricted topics, including union activity, health and protected characteristics, which appear only in aggregate, and admins cannot ask custom questions about them. TechCrunch reported that Anthropic says it will not use the data for model training by default.
These safeguards are settings, not guarantees, and they sit with the customer’s own owners. In practice, how a company configures attribution, and what its staff are told, will decide whether the reports are read as a planning tool or as surveillance. In the UK and EU, employers using them would also need to weigh data protection rules on monitoring staff.
Why Anthropic wants to prove value now
The commercial logic is plain. TechCrunch, citing financials Anthropic shared with investors this week, reported that Anthropic posted an operating profit in the second quarter and 900% net revenue retention, meaning spending from the same customers in the third quarter of 2026 was nine times the level a year earlier. The figures come as Anthropic prepares to list on Nasdaq, and fast-rising bills invite questions from customers’ finance teams. The help centre pitches reports as a way to “bring evidence to renewals”.
TechCrunch also cited a report from Jellyfish, which makes tools for software developers, covering 276,000 of its customers. It found that Claude Code and other tools built on Anthropic models were behind nearly a third of proposed code changes, and that spending on those tools had grown tenfold since the start of the year, to about 2% of total engineering cost. “Even if you’re saying 2% is still small, that 10x growth is growth that most CFOs didn’t plan for,” Nicholas Arcolano, Jellyfish’s chief scientist, told the publication.
Beta labels and what comes next
Anthropic’s own documentation has not fully caught up. The Claude Enterprise consumption guide still lists smart reports and pooled group budgets as beta, and says pools are not yet available through the Admin API. Public sector buyers, who now get discounted Claude through the GSA, will want to see whether the HIPAA and encryption-key limits are lifted, since those settings are common in regulated organisations.
Sources
- Claude, “Smart reports, surveys, and pooled group budgets for Claude Enterprise”, 28 October 2026
- Claude Help Center, “Get started with smart reports”
- Claude Help Center, “Let team members run smart reports for specific groups”
- Claude Help Center, “Manage pooled group budgets on Enterprise plans”
- Claude Help Center, “Claude Enterprise consumption guide”
- TechCrunch, “Anthropic just launched tools to show companies what their AI spending is buying”, 28 October 2026
Related stories
- Anthropic Makes Unified Claude Chat and Cowork Live for Enterprise
- Anthropic Files to List on Nasdaq as ANT, With $16.3bn H1 Revenue
- Anthropic Gives US Governments 40% Off Claude in Expanded GSA Deal
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