OpenAI just lost its enterprise AI crown to Anthropic
This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? .
Anthropic has crossed a symbolic threshold in the AI race: businesses are now spending more on Anthropic than OpenAI for the first time, according to one closely watched measure.
New data from Ramp's AI Index shows Anthropic reached 34.4% business adoption in April, overtaking OpenAI at 32.3%, a dramatic reversal in a market OpenAI once dominated.
Ramp helps companies pay their bills. It analyzes corporate card and bill-paying activity on its platform from more than 50,000 US businesses to track billions of dollars spent on AI services each month. The index doesn't capture all corporate spending on AI, but it's a popular way to track how this key part of the AI market is trending.
Anthropic's milestone marks one of the most significant shifts in the generative AI era. Not so long ago, OpenAI was the clear leader in enterprise AI. In January, Ramp data showed OpenAI far ahead of rivals, with adoption surging across software development, research, finance, and customer support. Now, the company that ignited the modern AI boom has been overtaken by its biggest challenger.
Anthropic has steadily gained momentum with corporate customers over the past year. Then, in late 2025 and early 2026, adoption surged as companies embraced Claude Code for software development. Anthropic is trying to extend that success into other enterprise workflows, such as legal operations, finance, and research.
Still, the victory may prove fragile. Ramp economist Ara Kharazian warned that AI competition remains unusually volatile, with businesses rapidly switching models based on factors including cost, performance, and reliability. Rising token costs, compute shortages, and growing interest in cheaper open-source alternatives could reshape the market again within months.
"We have never seen a software industry as dynamic, where newcomers can disrupt market leaders in a matter of months, and where the pace of development overrides the typical forces of vendor stickiness," Kharazian said. "So these results should not be construed to suggest Anthropic is the definitive leader in business adoption."
Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.
Read next
Alistair Barr is the author of Business Insider's Tech Memo newsletter. Sign up here. Before that, he was BI's Global Tech Editor and the Big Tech team leader at Bloomberg, following a reporting career at The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Reuters, and MarketWatch. Alistair won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2007 for coverage of short selling and was a finalist in 2013 for scoops on the Facebook IPO. More recently, he won a 2024 San Francisco Press Club award for commentary. Got a tip? Reach out using the secure messaging app Signal (+1 415-341-4927) or via email on abarr@businessinsider.com.ExpertiseAlistair oversees all things Big Tech, along with startups and venture capital. He writes analysis and columns about topics including generative AI, large language models, cloud computing, semiconductors, online search, e-commerce, EVs, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.Popular StoriesArtificial Intelligence:It's getting harder to make big leaps at the frontier of AIOpenAI's AI-adjusted earnings numbers have echoes of Groupon and WeWorkDeath by LLM: Stack Overflow's decline, and its plan to survive, shows the future of free online data in an AI worldCloud computing:Amazon dominated the first cloud era. The AI boom has kicked off Cloud 2.0, and the company doesn't have a head start this time.In cloud, there's AI (which is hot) and everything else (which is not)Chips:Why Intel is still so important: Real countries have fabsApple's made-in-the-USA chips signal a turnaround for the US's big semiconductor betEVs and Tesla:Tesla's AI supercomputer has a Silicon Valley town rushing to meet surging electricity demandTesla's Cybertruck is outselling almost every other EV in the USOnline Search:Google is losing its status as a verbA simple way to fix search: Bright pink ads
This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? .