Anthropic captures 20% of business market as AI adoption accelerates to new highs

Here's why Anthropic just had a breakout month

Why it matters: It was Anthropic's breakthrough month, writes Ara Kharazian, an economist at Ramp, which has been tracking business spending on AI. By the numbers: The share of companies paying for Anthropic increased to 20% from 17%, per Ramp, a company that offers corporate credit cards and expense-management tools to roughly 50,000 companies nationwide. * OpenAI dropped slightly from 37% to 36%. * One in five businesses that use Ramp now pay for Anthropic, up from one in 25 last year. The big picture: The competition between Anthropic and OpenAI is shaping up to be the Kendrick vs. Drake tech battle of our time. * It's not a zero-sum game in either realm. You can enjoy listening to "Not Like Us" and "God's Plan." Similarly, companies appear willing to pay for both companies' tools. * Anthropic isn't gaining users at OpenAI's expense -- at least so far, per the report. According to Ramp, about 79% of OpenAI users also pay for Anthropic. Between the lines: Anthropic's new software coding product, which went viral earlier this year, helped drive adoption. Yes, but: The Ramp data doesn't take into account workers inside companies who are using free AI tools -- which would skew the numbers more in OpenAI's favor, as ChatGPT remains the leader for consumers overall. * And Ramp's data skews toward more tech-forward early adopter type companies; not the full breadth of the business sector. * A December 2025 report from Menlo Ventures found that Anthropic captures 40% of enterprise LLM spend -- up from 24%, while OpenAI's share fell to 27%, down from 50%. But the data looked only at API usage (not chatbot sessions or consumer subscriptions). * Zoom out: Adoption is happening crazy fast: Nearly 47% of businesses paid for AI in January, a new high. In 2023, that number was less than 7%. The bottom line: "The race isn't zero-sum," says Ramp economist Ara Kharazian in a release Wednesday. "At least not yet."

This Major OpenAI Rival Is Surging, and There's a Surprising Reason Why

According to a monthly update to Ramp's AI Index, which measures data from over 50,000 of the company's U.S.-based business customers, 46.8 percent of businesses are currently paying for access to AI tools, and Anthropic's Claude is the fastest-growing tool of all. The company says that one in five U.S. businesses on Ramp now pays for Anthropic, up from one in 25 just a year ago. In the month of January alone, Ramp reported, Anthropic use rose from 16.7 to 19.5 percent of measured businesses. Over that same period, OpenAI's market share actually decreased slightly, from 36.8 to 35.9 percent. The natural takeaway might be that Anthropic is growing at the expense of OpenAI, but "so far," according to Ramp economist Ara Kharazian, "we're not seeing that." Kharazian says that OpenAI and Anthropic have nearly identical churn rates, with roughly 4 percent of users at both companies cancelling subscriptions each month. "If businesses were switching from OpenAI to Anthropic, you'd see that in OpenAI's churn," he wrote. "You don't."