OpenAI narrows Anthropic's lead among business users, Ramp finds

Ramp, the corporate credit card and expense-management company, has released data showing OpenAI has started closing the gap with Anthropic among U.S. business users — a rare signal of either company’s health before their planned IPOs let them release financials directly.

OpenAI, once the runaway leader among both businesses and consumers, lost that lead among Ramp’s paying business users back in May, when Anthropic hit 41% market share to OpenAI’s 39%; OpenAI has never regained it since. As of July, Anthropic held nearly 44% to OpenAI’s nearly 40%. The dataset covers more than 70,000 American businesses that spend billions through Ramp’s bill-pay and corporate-card products, skewed toward tech given Ramp’s popularity as a Silicon Valley corporate card.

Ramp economist Ara Kharazian said a closer look at the most recent numbers shows OpenAI growing faster than Anthropic in this segment so far in the third quarter — though with a month still left in the quarter, the trend could shift again. Ramp did not disclose actual dollar figures, only percentages, and the dataset isn’t a measure of the total market: it excludes large enterprises that use spend-management tools from providers like American Express rather than Ramp.

“GPT-5.6 Sol is really good, increasingly the choice for developers,” Kharazian posted on X, attributing OpenAI’s gains partly to that model and Anthropic’s slower growth to its pricier Fable 5 tier, whose adoption he said disappointed given its cost and data-retention requirements imposed by regulators. That framing may be an oversimplification: Fable is Anthropic’s premium tier, built for a narrower set of use cases than a general chatbot rather than a mass-market product, though the company did draw backlash when it warned Fable users it must retain their data for 30 days.

The overall market keeps expanding regardless of who is winning the split: the share of Ramp customers paying for AI topped 50% in March and reached nearly 56% by July.

Why it matters

The swing shows neither AI lab has locked in enterprise loyalty — businesses are still shopping between models as each lab ships new releases, a volatility that should worry investors betting on “sticky” enterprise AI spending.