Anthropic overtakes OpenAI in US business spending for first time

More American companies now pay for Anthropic’s Claude than for OpenAI’s ChatGPT. That’s according to expense data from Ramp, a fintech platform tracking over 50,000 U.S. businesses.

The May 2026 edition of the Ramp AI Index shows 34.4% of surveyed businesses paying for Anthropic products. OpenAI landed next at 32.3%. Anthropic jumped 3.8 percentage points in April alone while OpenAI fell 2.9 points, according to Ramp’s findings. Half of all businesses Ramp tracks now spend money on some form of AI service.

Anthropic had a year of explosive growth

In May 2025, fewer than 9% of businesses on Ramp’s platform were paying for Anthropic services. That figure quadrupled over the following year. However, OpenAI’s share grew just 0.3% over the same stretch.

Ramp lead economist Ara Kharazian said that Anthropic had already been leading “amongst the high adoption groups like finance, tech, professional services.”

Anthropic broadened its reach into other industries where OpenAI previously held a comfortable margin.

One product appears to have driven much of the acceleration. Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding tool, has become the company’s fastest growing product.

According to a February research by SemiAnalysis, around 4% of all public commits on GitHub were authored using Claude Code. That’s double the share from January.

Anthropic took over ~70% of businesses subscribing to AI tools for the first time.

Anthropic faces three risks

Anthropic faces three headwinds even as it takes the top spot.

The Claude maker earns more revenue when customers consume more tokens. This creates an incentive to push users toward costlier AI models which strains enterprise budgets.

Uber’s CTO disclosed that the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months, largely on Claude Code and related tools. Engineers at the company were spending between $500 and $2,000 per month each on API costs.

Users have reported frequent outages, tighter rate limits, and declining output quality in recent weeks. Anthropic responded by resetting usage caps and signing a compute deal with SpaceX for access to 300+ megawatts of capacity at the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis.

CEO Dario Amodei said the company experienced 80 times year-over-year growth in revenue and usage during Q1 2026, far exceeding internal projections of 10 times growth.

Rafael Hajjar, an economist at Ramp, found that Anthropic’s update triples token costs for prompts that include images. This change adds to other complaints about pricing and compute shortages.

What are the open source AI models alternatives?

Some of the fastest growing vendors on Ramp were AI inference providers that offered access to cheaper, open source models. OpenAI has also released Codex, a competing coding tool that performs similar tasks to Claude Code but at a lower cost.

Kharazian wrote, “The two indicators I’ll be tracking closely next month will be OpenAI’s market share, including growth in subscriptions as more developers pick up Codex, and the growth in AI inference platforms for cheaper models.”

According to Cryptopolitan’s reporting, Anthropic has reported annual revenue of $30 billion and expects to reach positive cash flow by 2027.

Ramp’s index relies on corporate card and invoice payments across its client base. The methodology likely undercounts many employees who use free AI tools. Still, with 50,000+ companies in the sample, the dataset offers one of the broadest views available into how American businesses are spending on AI.