Anthropic catching up
Reports suggest Anthropic is closing the gap with OpenAI in terms of enterprise spending, indicating customers may be diversifying AI vendors. The shift implies competition in business AI is increasingly about pricing, reliability and workflow fit rather than brand alone. (el-balad.com)
Anthropic is gaining on OpenAI in business AI spending, with new March data showing Claude adoption rising while OpenAI’s paid adoption slipped. (ramp.com) Ramp said nearly one in four businesses on its platform paid for Anthropic in March 2026, up from one in 25 a year earlier. The same update said OpenAI’s adoption fell 1.5 percentage points, its biggest one-month decline in Ramp’s tracking. (ramp.com) Ramp’s April 11, 2026 update said paid AI adoption crossed 50 percent of businesses for the first time in March and that Anthropic is “on track” to catch OpenAI soon. Ramp bases the index on card and bill-pay transactions across tens of thousands of companies. (ramp.com 1) (ramp.com 2) A separate market estimate from Menlo Ventures said Anthropic had already moved ahead in enterprise large language model usage by mid-2025. Its 2025 mid-year update put Anthropic at 32 percent of enterprise usage, ahead of OpenAI at 25 percent and Google at 20 percent. (menlovc.com) Menlo’s year-end 2025 enterprise report went further, estimating Anthropic at 40 percent of enterprise large language model spend, up from 24 percent a year earlier, while OpenAI fell to 32 percent from 50 percent in 2023. Menlo’s figures are estimates, not audited company results, but they point in the same direction as Ramp’s payment data. (menlovc.com) The fight is shifting from consumer brand recognition to corporate procurement. Companies buying AI for coding, customer support, search, and internal tools are comparing model quality, uptime, security controls, and contract terms rather than picking a single default vendor. (theinformation.com) (openai.com) Anthropic has been leaning into that market with product and sales messaging aimed at work use. Its September 2025 Economic Index introduced a detailed look at enterprise application programming interface use, and its February 12, 2026 funding announcement said the company viewed itself as a leader in enterprise AI and coding. (anthropic.com 1) (anthropic.com 2) OpenAI is still much larger by overall reach and continues to invest heavily in enterprise sales. On March 31, 2026, OpenAI said it had closed a $122 billion funding round to expand compute and meet demand for ChatGPT, Codex, and enterprise AI. (openai.com) Both companies are also using their own data to argue that business adoption is deepening. OpenAI’s 2025 enterprise report drew on usage data and a survey of 9,000 workers across nearly 100 enterprises, while Anthropic’s January and March 2026 Economic Index reports tracked how Claude was being used in work contexts and through first-party application programming interfaces. (openai.com) (anthropic.com 1) (anthropic.com 2) The immediate question is not whether OpenAI disappears from the enterprise market. It is whether large customers keep splitting budgets across multiple model vendors as Anthropic closes a gap that looked much wider a year ago. (ramp.com) (menlovc.com)
