OpenAI Gains Ground on Anthropic in US Business AI Market, Ramp Data Shows

OpenAI is regaining ground on Anthropic among U.S. businesses, new data from corporate spending platform Ramp shows, offering an early indication that competition between the two leading AI companies is becoming increasingly fluid as enterprises experiment with competing models.

Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has publicly disclosed the detailed financial information investors will eventually expect to see as the companies move closer to potential initial public offerings. In the meantime, corporate spending data can provide an imperfect but useful window into how businesses are allocating money across AI providers.

Ramp, which provides corporate cards, bill payment and expense management services, tracks spending patterns across more than 70,000 U.S. businesses. Its customers range across industries, although the company's concentration in technology startups and other venture-backed companies means the data is not representative of the entire American corporate economy.

The latest figures show Anthropic maintaining its lead among Ramp's paying business customers, but OpenAI is beginning to close the gap.

Anthropic accounted for nearly 44% of spending among the two companies in July, compared with nearly 40% for OpenAI, according to Ramp. The figures measure the share of Ramp's business customers paying for products from the two AI companies, rather than total revenue or the amount of money spent.

The shift began in May, when Anthropic overtook OpenAI for the first time among Ramp's paying business users. Anthropic reached 41% at the time, compared with OpenAI's 39%.

OpenAI has not reclaimed the top position since then. But Ramp economist Ara Kharazian said OpenAI was growing faster among the segment during the third quarter so far, suggesting the gap could narrow again.

"GPT-5.6 Sol is really good, increasingly the choice for developers," Kharazian said in a post on X, attributing part of OpenAI's recent momentum to its latest model.

The data provides a useful counterpoint to the idea that Anthropic has established a durable lead in enterprise AI. Anthropic's rise among businesses has been one of the most closely watched developments in the AI market. Its Claude models have developed a strong following among software developers and companies seeking AI systems for coding, research, and other professional applications.

OpenAI, meanwhile, has historically benefited from ChatGPT's enormous consumer user base and broad enterprise adoption. The company's challenge has been converting that early lead into sustained business spending as rivals improve their models and target specific professional workflows.

Ramp's numbers suggest that enterprise customers remain willing to switch between providers as new models emerge. That creates an important question for investors: how "sticky" is enterprise AI spending?

Traditional enterprise software tends to become deeply embedded in company workflows, creating switching costs that can make customers reluctant to move to competing products. AI may prove different because companies can test several models simultaneously, route different tasks to different systems, and change providers when a new model offers better performance, lower prices, or more favorable terms.

The result could be a more volatile enterprise software market in which model releases have a direct and immediate impact on corporate purchasing decisions.

Anthropic's lead also needs to be interpreted carefully. Ramp does not disclose the actual dollar value of spending represented by the percentages, and its dataset excludes companies that use competing corporate-spending platforms, including large businesses that manage expenses through providers such as American Express.

That makes Ramp's figures an indicator of market direction rather than a comprehensive measure of OpenAI or Anthropic's enterprise revenue.

The composition of Ramp's customer base also matters. Its concentration among technology companies and startups could make its customers more likely than the broader corporate market to experiment with multiple AI models, adopt new developer tools, and rapidly shift spending following major model launches.

Even with those limitations, the data points to a broader trend that could be more important than the competition between OpenAI and Anthropic themselves: corporate adoption of paid AI services is continuing to expand.

Among Ramp's customers, the percentage of businesses paying for AI products rose to nearly 56% in July, from more than 50% in March. That means OpenAI and Anthropic can both increase their business revenue even while competing for the same customers and losing relative market share to each other.

Market-share gains do not necessarily mean one company is taking revenue directly from another. If the number of businesses purchasing AI products continues to rise, both providers can expand rapidly while their relative positions fluctuate.

The model race is making that competition even more dynamic.

Companies are now evaluating AI systems based on coding performance, reasoning ability, agentic capabilities, price, latency, security, data controls, and integration with existing software. A model that wins on one of those dimensions can gain adoption quickly, while a rival can recover ground with its next release.

Anthropic's Fable 5, according to Kharazian, had weaker adoption in Ramp's data, which he attributed partly to its pricing and regulatory-related data-retention requirements. Anthropic has faced user concerns over its policy requiring Fable users to retain data for 30 days in certain circumstances.

Still, attributing changes in market share to a single model release would be premature. Enterprise purchasing decisions are influenced by a combination of model performance, pricing, procurement policies, security requirements, existing contracts, and how easily a system can be incorporated into a company's workflows.

The larger takeaway is that the U.S. enterprise AI market is entering a more competitive phase.

The first stage of generative AI adoption was dominated by experimentation, with companies testing ChatGPT and competing systems to determine where the technology could create value. The market is now moving toward a phase in which businesses are paying for AI at scale and evaluating competing models more systematically.

Ramp's data indicates that this transition is benefiting the market as a whole. More than half of the company's tracked businesses now pay for AI, and that proportion continues to rise. That expansion could matter for OpenAI and Anthropic as both companies approach a stage where investors will demand greater visibility into their financial performance.