Anthropic's AI Is Now More Popular With Businesses Than OpenAI's. Here's What That Means.

For the first time since AI tools became common in offices, Anthropic — the company behind an AI called Claude — has more business customers than OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The shift shows that nearly half of all businesses are now using some form of AI, according to new data from Ramp's AI Index.

Here's what changed. Anthropic is now capturing 37% of the money businesses spend on AI software, compared to 33% for OpenAI. And when a company is trying out AI for the first time and looks at both options side by side, it picks Anthropic about 70% of the time. Meanwhile, OpenAI lost 1.5% of its business customers in a single month — the biggest one-month drop for any AI company since tracking began.

Why Are Companies Choosing Anthropic

The data shows three types of industries where Anthropic is winning: financial services, insurance companies, and information services. These are sectors where companies care a lot about explaining how decisions get made and following strict rules. Anthropic has built its reputation on making AI that is safer and easier to understand.

Here's an important wrinkle: most companies are not choosing just one AI tool. About 79% of Anthropic customers also pay for OpenAI. In other words, they're using both. This is a bit like a restaurant stocking both Pepsi and Coke — the business wants options, and it doesn't feel like picking sides.

What the Numbers Really Tell Us

The growth itself is striking. Nearly half of all tracked businesses are now using AI, up from 46.8% just one month earlier. Two years ago, most business people had never heard of generative AI. Now it is normal.

OpenAI is still the AI service used by more total companies than any other single provider. But the way companies are spending money suggests a shift: they may be using OpenAI for some tasks and Anthropic for others, with Anthropic getting bigger budgets for the work it does. This could mean Anthropic is either charging more, or companies are finding more uses for Claude across different parts of their business.

The broader pattern here mirrors something we have seen before in technology. When cloud computing first grew in the 2010s, Amazon Web Services won first, but Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud gained ground by focusing on specific industries and solving particular problems. It looks like the AI market is heading the same way — different companies winning in different sectors based on what businesses actually need, rather than one company dominating everything.

What This Means Going Forward

If you work at a company thinking about using AI, this trend suggests you will likely hear more pitches from Anthropic. Businesses that have already picked OpenAI are increasingly adding Anthropic as a second option for specific tasks. The days of one-tool-fits-all are probably over.

The fact that companies are comfortable running both tools at once also says something about how AI is settling into business life. Companies are treating it less like picking a computer operating system — a choice you live with for years — and more like picking ingredients from multiple suppliers to get the right tool for each job. It is a sign the technology is mature enough that businesses know how to use it practically.