Anthropic gains traction
Enterprise buyers are starting to pay for alternatives to OpenAI, with Anthropic’s paid adoption rising markedly in recent months. Menlo Ventures data reported nearly a third of U.S. businesses paid for Anthropic last month—up from about 8% in 2024—while OpenAI remained larger at 42%. (pymnts.com)
Anthropic is winning more paying corporate customers, even as OpenAI remains the bigger supplier in workplace artificial intelligence. (pymnts.com) Menlo Ventures said nearly 31% of U.S. businesses paid for Anthropic in March 2026, up from about 8% in 2024. The same data put OpenAI at 42%, still the largest paid vendor among enterprise buyers. (pymnts.com) A separate Menlo Ventures report released July 31, 2025 found Anthropic had already passed OpenAI by enterprise model usage, with 32% share to OpenAI’s 25%. Two years earlier, Menlo said OpenAI held 50% and Anthropic 12%. (techcrunch.com) That shift is happening inside a market that is getting much larger, not smaller. Menlo Ventures said enterprises spent $37 billion on generative artificial intelligence in 2025, up from $11.5 billion in 2024, and more than half of that spending went to applications rather than raw model infrastructure. (menlovc.com) OpenAI still has the broader business footprint by customer count. The company said on June 4, 2025 that it had 3 million paying business users across ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Team and ChatGPT Edu, up from 2 million in February 2025. (cnbc.com) By December 17, 2025, OpenAI said more than 1 million business customers were using its tools and that enterprise ChatGPT message volume had grown eightfold year over year. The company said organizations were using more reasoning tokens through its application programming interface, a sign that customers were moving from trials to heavier workloads. (openai.com) Anthropic’s rise has been strongest in coding, where Menlo’s July 2025 report gave it 42% of enterprise usage, versus 21% for OpenAI. Menlo tied that jump to Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet release in June 2024 and Claude 3.7 Sonnet in February 2025. (techcrunch.com) Anthropic also made itself easier for corporate buyers to adopt through the cloud vendors they already use. Claude is offered through Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI and Microsoft Foundry, and Amazon said in November 2024 that its total investment in Anthropic would reach $8 billion. (aws.amazon.com) (docs.cloud.google.com) (azure.microsoft.com) (anthropic.com) Anthropic has also been building for larger workplace rollouts, with enterprise features such as single sign-on, Security Assertion Markup Language provisioning and administrative controls in Claude Enterprise. Those are the kinds of controls information-technology departments usually require before approving companywide deployments. (claude.com) The result is a more crowded enterprise race than the consumer market suggests. OpenAI still leads on business scale, but Anthropic has turned from a secondary option into a paid supplier that procurement teams now budget for. (pymnts.com)
