A year ago, OpenAI looked nearly impossible to catch in the enterprise AI market. Now, fresh data suggests businesses are increasingly choosing Anthropic instead of the long-time market leader.
New data from fintech company Ramp’s AI Index show that 34.4% of surveyed companies paid for Anthropic’s AI products in April, edging past OpenAI at 32.3%. This is the first time Anthropic has taken the top spot in the rankings.
The index is based on spending data from more than 50,000 US businesses using Ramp’s payment and expense platform. While it does not represent the entire market, the data is closely watched because it tracks real company spending on AI tools.
Claude Code drives growth
Anthropic’s rise has been fuelled largely by demand for Claude Code, the company’s AI coding assistant, which gained traction with developers and engineering teams in late 2025 and early 2026.
The company first found strong support among technical users before expanding into broader corporate functions.
“Anthropic has already been in the lead amongst the high adoption groups like finance, tech, professional services,” Ramp economist Ara Kharazian told TechCrunch. “It’s across the other firms where OpenAI still has a lead, but that has been shrinking over the past couple of months.”
Ramp’s data highlights just how quickly Anthropic has grown. In May 2025, only 9% of businesses tracked by the index were paying for Anthropic’s services. Over the following 12 months, that figure climbed by 26%.
During that same period, OpenAI’s share dipped slightly by 1%, even as overall business spending on AI products continued to rise.
Fluid landscape
The findings suggest companies are becoming more willing to experiment with different AI models instead of sticking with one provider. Price, performance, reliability, and specialised tools are increasingly influencing purchasing decisions, especially among software and research teams.
Kharazian told Business Insider the speed of change in AI has been unusual compared with traditional software markets.
“We have never seen a software industry as dynamic, where newcomers can disrupt market leaders in a matter of months, and where the pace of development overrides the typical forces of vendor stickiness,” he said. “So these results should not be construed to suggest Anthropic is the definitive leader in business adoption.”
Other industry trackers are showing similar trends. OpenRouter’s leaderboard, which measures usage across a different set of users, last placed OpenAI ahead of Anthropic in December 2025.
Still, Kharazian believes Anthropic’s strategy over the past year has clearly paid off.
“What Anthropic did worked really well,” Kharazian told TechCrunch, “which was — start with a very technical customer base, focus on their needs, really succeed in execution and then start broadening out through tools like Cowork.”
This comes as investor interest in Anthropic continues to grow. Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that the Claude maker is in early discussions to raise at least $30 billion in funding at a valuation exceeding $900 billion.
