OpenAI narrows gap with Anthropic in business AI adoption

OpenAI is closing the distance with Anthropic in the race for business AI customers, according to new spending data from financial platform Ramp that tracks more than 70,000 U.S. companies.

As of July 2026, Anthropic maintained a lead with 43.5% of businesses using its services, compared to OpenAI's 39.7%. But OpenAI has been expanding at a faster rate throughout the third quarter, gaining momentum even as Anthropic holds the larger share, Ramp economist Ara Kharazian told TechCrunch.

The shift comes despite Anthropic overtaking OpenAI in market share back in May. Anthropic gained 1.1 percentage points in July alone, while OpenAI added just 0.23 percentage points. Yet the quarterly growth trajectory favors OpenAI, suggesting the competitive dynamic remains fluid.

Model performance drives adoption patterns

The data reveals a stark contrast in how businesses are responding to each company's latest models. OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol accounted for 25% of tokens purchased from the company and 23% of total spending in July. Anthropic's Fable 5, by comparison, represented only 6% of tokens and 11.4% of spending from its customers.

In absolute terms, Fable 5 generated roughly 75% as much model-specific revenue as GPT-5.6 Sol during the month.

Kharazian attributed the disparity partly to pricing. Fable 5 costs approximately $10 per million tokens—roughly double the price of GPT-5.6 Sol—which has limited business appetite for the more expensive option. Anthropic also faced criticism after informing Fable users that regulatory requirements mandate retaining their data for one month, according to TechCrunch.

Why it matters

The spending patterns suggest enterprise AI adoption remains experimental rather than locked in. Overall AI adoption among Ramp-tracked businesses climbed to nearly 56% in July from just over 50% in March, but momentum behind both leading providers has cooled as companies increasingly test open-source alternatives. The share of AI-using businesses on Ramp's platform that rely on model-serving platforms for open-source models rose to 6.1% in July, up 0.2 percentage points from June.

This volatility occurs against a backdrop of widening financial divergence between the two companies. Anthropic reported $11.6 billion in second-quarter revenue, surpassing OpenAI for the first time, while OpenAI recorded $6.7 billion in the same period, according to CNBC and The Wall Street Journal. OpenAI's operating loss reached $12.3 billion in Q2, while Anthropic posted a small adjusted operating profit, SiliconAngle reported.

OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told employees that the company's annualized recurring revenue in July had already exceeded its full second-quarter total, crediting the GPT-5.6 model series, an enterprise agent called ChatGPT Work, and its Codex coding tool.

The Ramp data covers only companies using its expense management platform, offering a meaningful but incomplete view of the broader enterprise AI market.

These details were first reported by Quartz, citing Ramp's spending analysis.