Anthropic Captures Majority of Enterprise AI Spending Dollars While OpenAI Narrows the Business Adoption Gap

Two Scoreboards, Two Different Leaders

Depending on which dataset you read, either Anthropic is crushing OpenAI or OpenAI is clawing its way back. Both are true, because they're measuring different things.

Vercel's AI Gateway, which tracks actual dollars flowing through enterprise API traffic, shows Anthropic capturing 61-65% of business AI spending on just 30-32% of total token volume, according to Crypto Briefing. Do the math and Anthropic is charging roughly 4.4 times the average price per token that OpenAI charges. That's a company selling less volume for a lot more money.

Ramp's AI Index, which tracks the share of over 70,000 U.S. businesses that pay for each provider through its corporate card and bill-pay platform, tells a narrower story: 43.5% of Ramp's business customers paid for Anthropic in July, up 1.1 percentage points from June, versus 39.7% for OpenAI, up just 0.23 points, according to Quartz and officechai. That's an adoption measure, not a dollar-spend measure.

Crypto Briefing's own writeup blurs this line, describing Ramp's percentage figures as "business AI spending" when Ramp itself, per Quartz, Yahoo Finance, and Business Insider, is actually counting the share of businesses that pay for each vendor, not the dollars they spend. That distinction matters. A vendor can sign up more paying customers while still collecting a smaller slice of total spend, which is precisely what the Vercel numbers suggest is happening: OpenAI has more users paying less per token, Anthropic has fewer users paying a premium.

How Anthropic Got Here

The trajectory has been steep. In 2023, Anthropic held roughly 12% of enterprise LLM spending while OpenAI commanded around 50%, per Crypto Briefing. By December 2025, a Menlo Ventures survey put Anthropic at 40% and OpenAI at 27%. Ramp's own tracking shows Anthropic first overtaking OpenAI among its paying business users in May 2026, hitting 41% to OpenAI's 39%, according to Yahoo Finance's Julie Bort.

The gap kept widening through June and July, and Anthropic has built a particular stronghold in coding and agentic tools, capturing about 54% of that segment on Vercel's gateway data versus 21% for OpenAI. Anthropic's average user now spends around $420 versus $310 for an OpenAI user, and roughly 80% of Anthropic's revenue comes from enterprise and API customers rather than consumer subscriptions.

OpenAI's Q3 Comeback and Fable 5's Rough Landing

OpenAI is growing faster than Anthropic among Ramp's business users so far in the third quarter of 2026, according to Kharazian, who told Business Insider and posted on X about the new GPT-5.6 Sol model. "GPT-5.6 Sol is really good, increasingly the choice for developers," he wrote.

Anthropic's counterpart, Fable 5, has struggled. The model was briefly pulled under a U.S. export control order before being restored to global access on July 1, 2026, according to officechai and Business Insider. It's priced around $10 per million tokens, roughly double GPT-5.6 Sol's cost, and Anthropic separately disclosed a 30-day data retention requirement for Fable users to comply with regulatory obligations, which Quartz reported sparked backlash.

The usage numbers back up the tepid reception. In July, Fable 5 accounted for only 6% of tokens businesses bought from Anthropic and 11.4% of dollars spent on Anthropic models, generating about 75% as much spend as GPT-5.6 Sol, which made up 25% of OpenAI's tokens and 23% of its spend, per Quartz's reporting on Ramp's data.

The Rest of the Field, and the Money Behind It

xAI posted its fastest monthly growth since mid-2025, adding 0.94 percentage points to reach 4% of Ramp's business customers in July. Google sat at 6.2%, down from 6.4%, though Kharazian told Business Insider that number is likely understated because Google Workspace integrations aren't fully captured. DeepSeek registered barely above zero on Ramp's measure, even as open-source and Chinese model-serving platforms grew from 4.5% of AI-spending businesses in January to 6.1% in July, officechai reported, mostly among existing sophisticated spenders adding a second option rather than new customers switching away from the two leaders.

The financial backdrop explains why both companies are fighting so hard for this share. Anthropic posted $11.6 billion in second-quarter revenue, topping OpenAI's $6.7 billion for the first time, according to Quartz, citing CNBC and The Wall Street Journal. But OpenAI recorded a $12.3 billion operating loss in the same quarter, while Anthropic posted a small adjusted operating profit. Neither company has gone public, and both are said by Yahoo Finance to be working toward eventual IPOs, meaning none of this is showing up yet in audited public filings.

What the Data Can't Prove

A fair skeptic could point out that a one-point swing in a single month, on a dataset that excludes every large enterprise running expenses through American Express-style platforms, doesn't prove much about who's actually winning the AI war. Ramp itself declined to release dollar figures, and Business Insider noted its customer base skews toward smaller, tech-heavy firms. Kharazian has acknowledged as much, calling the numbers "directional" rather than a full market picture.

The same volatility that makes any one month's data shaky also means neither company has locked in a permanent advantage. Ramp's Q3 2026 figures won't be final until the quarter closes in late September, and whether GPT-5.6 Sol's momentum holds against Anthropic's coding and enterprise dominance remains unresolved. Also unresolved: 67% of development teams already use multiple AI providers, according to Crypto Briefing, meaning many of the businesses in these datasets are paying both companies at once rather than picking a winner.