Anthropic just beat OpenAI in business adoption

If you want to know who is actually winning the AI race, look at corporate credit card bills instead of social media hype.

Fintech firm Ramp just released its latest AI Index, based on spending data from more than 50,000 businesses. For the first time ever, Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI in business adoption.

According to the report, 34.4% of businesses are now paying for Anthropic services, while OpenAI dropped to 32.3%. Across the entire sample, 50.6% of companies now pay for at least one AI tool.

How Claude caught up

Anthropic’s climb over the past year has been nothing short of wild.

Back in May 2025, just 9% of businesses were paying for Anthropic. Over the following twelve months, that adoption rate quadrupled. During that exact same stretch, OpenAI’s share essentially flatlined, slipping about 1%.

Ramp economist Ara Kharazian noted that Anthropic was already dominating high-adoption sectors like software, finance, and professional services. What changed recently is that OpenAI’s lead in more traditional business sectors began to evaporate.

This isn't an isolated signal either. On the OpenRouter developer leaderboard, OpenAI hasn't topped Anthropic since December 2025.

The growing pains ahead

Anthropic won over companies with a clear playbook: nail the hardest technical workflows first, win over engineers, and then expand across departments with broader tools like Cowork.

Still, holding the crown might be harder than winning it.

For starters, Ramp’s sample leans heavily toward tech companies and startups. Kharazian himself has voiced skepticism about whether Anthropic’s lead will hold across the broader economy.

Anthropic is also facing self-inflicted friction. Users have complained about recent service outages, rising operating expenses, and a recent model update that tripled token costs for image-based prompts.

Why it matters

We think this shift proves that enterprise AI loyalty is paper-thin.

OpenAI still owns consumer mindshare, but inside companies, engineers and knowledge workers vote with their corporate cards. Claude didn't win through flashier marketing; it won because developers decided its reasoning and coding output simply got the job done better.

If you run an engineering or research team, leaning on Anthropic right now is the obvious call. It has earned its place as the enterprise benchmark for complex knowledge work.

That said, Anthropic is now entering the dangerous phase of enterprise software. When you become the default, clients stop forgiving outages, and they notice when token prices spike on image queries. If Anthropic treats pricing and uptime casually, those same fickle developers will migrate to the next frontier model overnight.