Anthropic Gains Ground — and Scrutiny
The Financial Times reports Anthropic is closing the gap with OpenAI on U.S. business usage, driven in part by interest in Claude Code products. Business Insider separately says Anthropic leads peers in web scraping volume, a practice drawing scrutiny about reciprocity and web‑scale sourcing. (ft.com) (businessinsider.com)
Anthropic is closing in on OpenAI among United States businesses even as its web-crawling practices face fresh scrutiny. (ramp.com) (support.claude.com) Ramp said on April 11 that 30.6% of businesses on its platform were paying for Anthropic in March, up from 24.4% in February, while OpenAI stood at 35.2%. Ramp said the gap narrowed to 4.6 percentage points from 11 points in February. (ramp.com 1) (ramp.com 2) Ramp tracks corporate card and invoiced payments, not every form of software use, and OpenAI said April 8 that enterprise now makes up more than 40% of its revenue. OpenAI also said Codex had reached 3 million weekly active users and named customers including Goldman Sachs, DoorDash, Thermo Fisher, and State Farm. (ramp.com) (openai.com) A big part of Anthropic’s rise is coding software that acts more like a junior engineer than an autocomplete tool. Anthropic says Claude Code can read a codebase, edit files across a project, run tests, and commit code. (anthropic.com) Ramp said on March 11 that Anthropic was winning about 70% of head-to-head matchups with OpenAI among businesses buying artificial intelligence services for the first time. The same post said Anthropic’s demand was outstripping its own computing capacity, with usage limits and rate caps still in place across plans. (ramp.com) The second front is the web itself. Anthropic says it uses three bots — ClaudeBot for model development, Claude-User for user-requested retrieval, and Claude-SearchBot for search indexing — and says site owners can block them with robots.txt rules. (support.claude.com) Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince said in June 2025 that Anthropic was sending one visitor to publishers for every 60,000 pages crawled, compared with 1,500 pages for OpenAI and 18 for Google. Cloudflare later launched “pay per crawl” in private beta on July 1, 2025 and said new domains would be asked whether to allow or block AI crawlers. (axios.com) (blog.cloudflare.com) (cnbc.com) Anthropic says its bots honor robots.txt, support crawl-delay, and do not bypass CAPTCHAs. Publishers and infrastructure companies are pushing for a system that turns those voluntary rules into payment or permission. (support.claude.com) (blog.cloudflare.com) That leaves Anthropic in two races at once in April 2026: one to win more business customers, and another to prove that taking more from the web will not cost it access to the web. (ramp.com) (support.claude.com)
