Anthropic overtook OpenAI in business AI spending in May, even as its clash with the Trump administration intensified.
Key Points:
- Ramp data showed Anthropic reached 41% of paid business AI subscriptions in May.
- The Trump administration’s latest order forced Anthropic to pull Mythos 5 and Fable 5 from the market.
- Ramp economist Ara Kharazian said the controversy may strengthen Anthropic’s appeal to business users.
Anthropic Sales
Media reported that Anthropic finished May ahead of OpenAI in business AI subscription share for the first time, citing new data from Ramp, which tracks spending by more than 70,000 companies.
Ramp said Anthropic’s share rose 2.5 percentage points in May to 41%, while OpenAI held 39.5% and was essentially flat from the previous month.
The gain came during a volatile period for Anthropic. The company raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation in late May, filed confidential IPO paperwork in June and reportedly posted its first profitable quarter.
The Trump administration then sent Anthropic a letter demanding that it block non-Americans, including company employees, from using Mythos 5 and Fable 5.
Anthropic pulled both models instead of trying to enforce that restriction across users and staff.
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Ramp Data
The White House cited an export control directive, though the precise trigger remains unclear. The dispute followed claims that Fable 5 guardrails could be bypassed to reach Mythos-level cybersecurity capabilities.
Ara Kharazian, Ramp’s lead economist, told TechCrunch that the dispute may help Anthropic because buyers often see regulatory scrutiny as proof that a model is powerful.
“If anything, it’ll probably boost them,” Kharazian said. He added that Anthropic’s strongest month for business adoption came after the Defense Department labeled it a supply-chain risk in March.
Ramp’s data does not show how much revenue Anthropic lost by removing Mythos 5 and Fable 5. It does show that companies were still spending heavily on Opus models, including the later versions that remained available.
When Ramp could identify model-level spending, which it could do in about one-third of transactions, businesses mostly paid for Claude Opus variants. Anthropic released Opus 4.8 in late May, while Mythos had only been available to limited users since April and Fable 5 lasted only days before the shutdown.
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