Anthropic Overtakes OpenAI in Enterprise AI Market, Signaling Shift in Industry Dynamics

Enterprises prefer Anthropic's AI models over anyone else's, including OpenAI's | TechCrunch

AI research lab Anthropic's AI models are now the top choice for enterprises, surpassing OpenAI. Anthropic now holds 32% of the enterprise large language model market share by usage, according to a report from Menlo Ventures released on Thursday. OpenAI holds the second-largest market share by usage among enterprises, with 25%. The figure marks a strong reversal from even just a couple of years ago. Since 2023, OpenAI has seen its market share among enterprises decline sharply, according to the report, as Anthropic's has steadily risen over the same timeframe. OpenAI held 50% of the enterprise market share by usage just two years ago while Anthropic had 12%. Google has seen enterprise usage for its models increase over the last few years as well. Anthropic has an even larger market share when it comes to coding, with 42% of the enterprise market share, the largest market share by a wide margin. Enterprise usage of Anthropic's AI models are more than double OpenAI's, when it comes to coding, which garnered 21% of overall market share. Anthropic's release of its Claude 3.5 Sonnet model in June 2024 is what laid the foundation for the company's surge in usage, according to the report. The release of Claude 3.7 Sonnet in February 2025 only accelerated that momentum. The findings from Menlo Ventures align with anecdotal chatter in the industry, which suggested that enterprise and startup developers preferred Claude over OpenAI's ChatGPT. Meanwhile, OpenAI has a strong foothold on the consumer side of the house. The company reported last week that its users send more than 2.5 billion prompts to ChatGPT a day. The Menlo Ventures report found enterprises prefer closed models, which Anthropic and OpenAI use. More than half of enterprises replied that they don't use open source models at all. Only 13% of enterprise daily workloads use open source models as of mid-year 2025, down from 19% at the beginning of the year. Meta still maintains dominance in the open source market.

Enterprises prefer Anthropic's AI models over anyone else's, including OpenAI | TechCrunch

AI research lab Anthropic's AI models are now the top choice for enterprises, surpassing OpenAI. Anthropic now holds 32% of the enterprise LLM market share by usage, according to a report from Menlo Ventures released on Thursday. OpenAI holds the second-largest market share by usage among enterprises with 25%. The figure marks a strong reversal from even just a couple of years ago. Since 2023, OpenAI has seen its market share among enterprises decline sharply, according to the report, as Anthropic's has steadily risen over the same timeframe. OpenAI held 50% of the enterprise market share by usage just two years ago while Anthropic had 12%. Google has seen enterprise usage for its models increase over the last few years as well. Anthropic has an even larger market share when it comes to coding with 42% of the enterprise market share, the largest market share by a wide margin. Enterprise usage of Anthropic's AI models are more than double OpenAI's, when it comes to coding, which garnered 21% of overall market share. Anthropic release of its Claude Sonnet 3.5 model in June 2024 is what laid the foundation for the company's surge in usage, according to the report. The release of Claude Sonnet 3.7 in February 2025 only accelerated that momentum. The findings from Menlo Ventures align with anecdotal chatter in the industry, which suggested that enterprise and startup developers preferred Claude over OpenAI's ChatGPT. Meanwhile, OpenAI has a strong foothold on the consumer side of the house. The company reported last week that its users send more than 2.5 billion prompts to ChatGPT a day. The Menlo Ventures report found enterprises prefer closed models, which Anthropic and OpenAI use. More than half of enterprises replied that they don't use open source models at all. Only 13% of enterprise daily workloads use open source models as of mid-year 2025, down from 19% at the beginning of the year. Meta still maintains dominance in the open source market.

Anthropic beats OpenAI as the top LLM provider for business - and it's not even close

Open-source AI is lagging behind its proprietary competitors. If you were to ask J. Random User on the street what the most popular business AI Large Language Model (LLM) is, I bet you they'd say OpenAI's ChatGPT. As of mid-2025, however, Anthropic is the leading enterprise LLM provider, with 32% of enterprise usage, according to Menlo Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm. Before you get too excited, though, keep in mind that Menlo Ventures is a major Anthropic investor. The firm has backed the company through several significant funding rounds, including leading their Series D round and participating in their $3.5 billion Series E, which valued Anthropic at $61.5 billion. Also: What happened when Anthropic's Claude AI ran a small shop for a month (spoiler: it got weird) In other words, Menlo Ventures has billions of reasons to praise Anthropic. That said, others also view Anthropic as the top enterprise AI company. As AI Magazine put it, "Anthropic has established itself as the premier enterprise AI company through its Claude family of LLMs, achieving remarkable 1,000% year-over-year growth to reach $3 billion in annual recurring revenue." Even by hyper-aggressive AI standards, that's real growth. Behind Anthropic, you'll find OpenAI, which now has 25%; Google with 20%; and Meta Llama with 9%. All the way in the back, with a mere 1% you'll find DeepSeek, followed by the rest of the pack. Menlo Ventures credits Anthropic's rapid ascent to the strong performance of its Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus models. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) These numbers reflect the proportion of production AI use, not spending. They were derived from a survey of 150 technical decision-makers at enterprises and startups building AI applications in the summer of 2025. Three different factors are driving Anthropic's rise. The first is what Menlo Ventures calls "AI's first killer app": Code generation. While AI-created code quality remains questionable, nevertheless, more developers are using AI programming tools than ever, and Claude has become programmers' top choice with 42% of the market share. That's double OpenAI's 21% share. There are concrete examples of Anthropic development programs gaining popularity. For instance, in just one year, Claude helped transform GitHub Copilot into a $1.9-billion ecosystem. Claude Sonnet 3.5's 2024 release showed how LLM breakthroughs can make possible entirely new categories such as AI IDEs, Cursor and Windsurf; vibe app builders, Lovable, Bolt, and Replit; and enterprise coding agents, Claude Code and All Hands. Another reason Anthropic is winning is its use of reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to train its LLMs. Behind that complicated name lies a simple concept: You provide clear, binary feedback (1 for correct, 0 for incorrect) on the model's output. This works well for programming AI tools, where the code either works or doesn't. Anthropic has also led the way to LLMs that take step-by-step approaches to solving problems and use external tools to pull in data to deliver better answers. In short, Anthropic has been a leader in creating AI agents. Besides helping people and programmers, this approach can help LLMs iteratively improve their responses and integrate tools like search, calculators, coding environments, and other resources via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This new open-source protocol enables LLMs and AI agents to seamlessly connect with the vast, ever-changing landscape of real-world data, tools, and services. Also: 7 strategic insights business and IT leaders need for AI transformation in 2025 That's important because Menlo Ventures also found that it's not price that drives companies to change LLMs, it's performance. "This creates an unexpected market dynamic: Even as individual models drop 10x in price, builders don't capture savings by using older models; they just move en masse to the best-performing one." This dynamic may change once LLMs start to mature and models begin to reach similar performance levels. For now, though, as LLMs improve massively from one release to another, companies are willing to pay for the newest and fastest. The study also found that companies are steadily shifting from building and training models to inference, that is, with models actually running in production. Startups are leading the way, with 74% of builders now stating that most of their workloads are in production. Large enterprises aren't far behind, with 49% reporting that most or nearly all of their computers are in production. In short, enterprises are now using AI, not merely building AI. Finally, the researchers said that open-source LLMs have declined to 13% of AI workloads today from 19% six months ago. The market leader remains Llama, albeit that Llama isn't really open source. Also: How agentic AI is transforming the very foundations of business strategy Nevertheless, more open-source LLMs have been appearing. These include new models from DeepSeek (V3, R1), Bytedance Seed (Doubao), Minimax (Text 1), Alibaba (Qwen 3), Moonshot AI (Kimi K2), and Z AI (GLM 4.5) in the last six months. They're just not used much. That's because, despite their advantages, "greater customization, potential cost savings, and the ability to deploy within private cloud or on-premises environments," their performance has continued to "trail frontier, closed-source models." Add in that many of the best-performing open-source LLMs to date are from Chinese companies that Western businesses are wary of, and open-source LLMs appear to be stalling out. "Predicting the future of AI can be a fool's errand. The market changes by the week, with exciting new model launches, advancements in foundation model capabilities, and plunging costs," Menlo Ventures said. Still, "conditions are ripe for a new generation of enduring AI businesses to be built on top of today's foundational building blocks." The question remains, however, "What will those foundational building blocks be?" OpenAI? Google, Meta? Anthropic? Stay tuned. We're not yet close to being able to say which AI models will ultimately end up on top.

Anthropic Just Surpassed OpenAI in the $8.4 Billion Enterprise Market, Says New Report

OpenAI might have the highest valuation of the new crop of AI startups, but when it comes to enterprise usage, Anthropic is the new king of the hill, according to a new report from Menlo Ventures. Based on a survey of 150 technical startup and enterprise leaders, Menlo claims that while OpenAI has dominated enterprise spending on large language models (LLMs) for some time, Anthropic is now the market leader, with 32 percent of enterprise usage. OpenAI, which had a 50 percent share of that market through 2023, now controls just 25 percent, says Menlo. (Anthropic, it's worth noting, is a Menlo portfolio company. Menlo has invested in the Series C, D, and E rounds, though the exact amount the company has contributed is not public.) It's a smaller piece of a much bigger (and fast-growing) pie, however. In the past six months, enterprise spending has more than doubled, climbing from $3.5 billion at the start of the year to $8.4 billion now. By the end of the year, Menlo projects that number will be in the neighborhood of $13 billion. Anthropic, which is reportedly in talks to raise another $5 billion -- raising its valuation to $170 billion -- isn't the only AI company to see market share gains. Menlo says Google has increased its market share to 20 percent as Gemini sees improvements. Meta's Llama holds a 9 percent share, while DeepSeek barely pings the radar, making up just 1 percent of usage. "Some might be surprised to see Anthropic overtake OpenAI, given its first-mover advantage," said Tim Tully, partner at Menlo Ventures. "But our research puts real numbers behind what we've heard anecdotally from the market: Teams are prioritizing real performance in production." Despite the increased usage by enterprise customers, challenges remain for Anthropic. Last month, the company won a key ruling in an ongoing lawsuit over using books without permission to train its system, but that suit is far from over and it could expose the company to billions of dollars in copyright damages. While Anthropic has unseated OpenAI, according to Menlo's study, the venture capital firm also found that businesses do not lightly hopscotch from one AI company to another. Vendor switching is a rare thing, with just 11 percent of teams reporting a change in their model provider in the past year. Two-thirds of the people surveyed said they had upgraded to newer models from existing providers. The rest made no changes at all. The way enterprise and startup customers use AI is changing, though. A growing number are using their preferred large language model to draw conclusions from data, rather than working to train the AI. Menlo says 74 percent of startups and 49 percent of enterprises said that inference (the term for AI decision making) made up most of their computing usage. Both numbers are up significantly from last November, the firm said. The next evolution, the company said, would likely be the use of AI to autonomously handle multistep, open-ended tasks, such as software development and research synthesis -- a process known as long-horizon agents. While these systems are still early in their development cycle, Menlo said it believes they will be key to the next wave of business AI adoption. "Long-horizon agents represent an operating model shift," said Derek Xiao, an investor at Menlo Ventures. "The startups building agentic infrastructure today are laying the foundation for the next generation of $10 billion-plus platforms. With legacy vendors lagging behind, the opportunity is massive." The growing use of AI by enterprise and startup businesses mirrors the increased use among consumers. A separate Menlo study last month found that 61 percent of Americans now use AI, with just shy of one in five adults using it daily. The trust factor in some areas was low in that study, however. Just 16 percent of consumers use the technology to navigate health care (such as dealing with insurance or caregivers), and only 18 percent use AI to manage expenses such as monthly bill payments, budgeting, and expense tracking. As enterprise and small-business trust grows with increased inference usage, though, that could prompt consumers to do the same. The final deadline for the 2025 Inc. Power Partner Awards is Friday, August 8, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.