How Zip is Scaling Anthropic's Procurement

Anthropic is an American AI company structured as a public benefit corporation, dedicated to developing safe and beneficial large language models. The company is best known for Claude, its flagship AI assistant.

The company has pioneered constitutional AI, an approach designed to align AI models with principles that benefit humanity, establishing itself as a leader in responsible AI development.

Building procurement from the ground up during hypergrowth

While it is one of the fastest growing companies in the world, scaling five times the headcount over the last 18 months – with its procurement team building everything from scratch during this time.

Before Zip, Anthropic had no standardised vendor onboarding or payment process as the company experienced hypergrowth, fragmented workflow across multiple disconnected systems and various payment platforms and limited ability to track renewals or prevent duplicate software spending.

Through Zip, it was able to structure and streamline the procure-to-pay process, supporting volume growth while maintaining the same team headcount and achieve policy adoption within the first year. Zip helped to establish policies, move from corporate cards to a full procure-to-pay process and form the operational frameworks that could support unprecedented scaling.

A four-level AI integration framework

When working to create this procurement and finance operation, it looked to integrate the AI assistant, Claude, into its four-level framework:

Claude the Consultant provides strategic advisory and problem solving, helping with FinOps advice, new hire onboarding and presentation preparation.

Claude the Teammate creates outputs like policies, SOPs and how-to guides. The team uses Claude for vendor pricing negotiations, drafting emails, calculating savings scenarios and creating executive summaries.

Claude the Analyst delivers real-time insights and analysis. The team uses Claude to generate procure-to-pay metrics and is advancing to Claude Code to transform monthly metrics into auto-populated slide decks.

Claude the Agent automates responses and integrations. Through Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations with Asana, Slack and Google, Claude takes meeting notes, creates project plans and automatically pushes them into project management systems.

Rather than pursuing every possible AI application, Anthropic's team follows a structured three-stage approach:

The first stage focuses on efficiency. The team uses AI to handle documentation, policies, training materials and presentations, which frees up capacity by addressing the common problem where 20% of tasks consume 80% of available time.

This efficiency creates space for innovation. When teams aren't overwhelmed by tactical work, they gain room for creative and strategic thinking. This allows procurement to proactively drive new initiatives instead of simply reacting to requests.

Sustained innovation then enables transformation. As the team rethinks legacy processes, they unlock additional efficiency gains that continue to evolve over time.

This framework has become part of Anthropic's organisational culture, with the finance operations team establishing a "Claudification OKR" to systematically identify and implement AI applications.

The operational foundation for sustainable success.

Despite rapid growth, Anthropic achieved 95% policy adoption in its first year. Procure-to-pay volume more than doubled whilst the procurement team size stayed constant.

The team successfully moved from corporate cards to a structured procure-to-pay process in Zip, building the operational foundation required for sustainable success.

Going forward, Anthropic envisions AI transforming procurement in three key ways: through enhanced adoption, with AI assistants providing real-time guidance through processes; through automation that removes manual steps; and through assurance, where AI reviews invoices against contracts before they reach approvers.

Through its partnership with Zip and implementation of an AI maturity framework, Anthropic has demonstrated that procurement can evolve from a necessary operational function into a strategic asset, even during periods of rapid organisational growth.

2025: The year of Zip

Anthropic success is another string to the bow of Zip, which has become, in the eyes of many, the world's leading agentic procurement orchestration platform, offering a single front door to unify the teams, tasks and tools involved in working with suppliers. In 2025, Zip surpassed US$6bn in customer savings.

Rujul Zaparde, Co-founder and CEO of Zip, said: "What began as a simpler way to start a purchase has grown into a full procurement operating system.

"This year (2025), we introduced agentic procurement orchestration – not just a new term and category, but a new way of thinking about how AI can transform every aspect of how companies purchase. The results speak for themselves: US$6bn saved, 10 million days of cycle time eliminated and procurement's emergence as a board-level priority."