Anthropic beats OpenAI on business adoption (4 minute read)

# Anthropic beats OpenAI on business adoption Source: [https://econlab.substack.com/p/anthropic-beats-openai](https://econlab.substack.com/p/anthropic-beats-openai) **Dear Colleagues**: Today’s letter includes my monthly update of[Ramp AI Index](http://ramp.com/data/ai-index), our flagship research using spend data from Ramp to track how American businesses are using AI\. My comments in the Wall Street Journal[today](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-was-behind-now-its-the-ai-booms-front-runner-5020f621)\. Today, for the first time, Anthropic passed OpenAI in business adoption, according to our latest release of[Ramp AI Index](http://rampcom/data/ai-index)\. Adoption of Anthropic rose 3\.8% in April to 34\.4% of businesses\. OpenAI adoption fell 2\.9% to 32\.3%\. Overall AI adoption rose 0\.2 percentage points to 50\.6%\. **A note on our methodology:**Ramp AI Index is developed using business spend data from Ramp\. We count corporate card and invoiced\-based payments in our measurements\. Read about our research approach[here](https://ramp.com/velocity/how-ramp-data-works)\. Our results mark a stunning reversal in the competitive market dynamics for AI model providers\. Anthropic takes the lead following a banner year of month\-over\-month increases in business adoption\. Over the last year, Anthropic has quadrupled business adoption while OpenAI grew business adoption by only 0\.3%\. Since we started publishing Ramp AI Index a year ago, I’m often asked which company I think will win the AI race\. I’ve sometimes worried that my pronouncements about one model’s market standing are seen as a declaration of one company’s dominance rather than factual statements based on the latest data\. The truth is 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\. So these results should not be construed to suggest Anthropic is the definitive leader in business adoption\. In fact, here are three headwinds facing Anthropic: 1. **Anthropic’s incentives are misaligned with those of business customers\.**Anthropic makes more money when businesses purchase more tokens\. This means that Anthropic is incentivized to drive users to more expensive models, even when cheaper models are sufficient and faster for many tasks\. Uber’s CTO[announced](https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/applied-ai/uber-cto-shows-claude-code-can-blow-ai-budgets)the company already blew through its 2026 AI budget\. Anthropic will lose market share if cost\-cutting drives firms to identify and route toward cheaper models\. For what it’s worth, this is also true of OpenAI, but the next two reasons are specific to Anthropic\. 1. **Claude has gotten worse\.**In recent weeks, users have[experienced](https://fortune.com/2026/04/14/anthropic-claude-performance-decline-user-complaints-backlash-lack-of-transparency-accusations-compute-crunch/)frequent outages, rate limits, and increasing dissatisfaction with results\. To Anthropic’s credit, they’ve responded swiftly\. The company[reset](https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem)usage limits for all users in April, and a new[deal](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/06/anthropic-spacex-data-center-capacity.html)with SpaceX will resolve compute constraints for the immediate future\. 1. **Anthropic’s recent changes to models are only making its cost and compute problems worse\.**Econ Lab colleague Rafael Hajjar[found](https://x.com/RafaelHajjar/status/2045175434787045449)Anthropic’s latest model update would 3x token costs for any prompt that includes an image\. Given concerns around rising costs and insufficient compute, I’m not sure why the product roadmap would prioritize this — it increases costs more than it drives value to the user\. [ rafael hajjar@RafaelHajjar This is sneaky: If you use images in your prompts, your tokens will disappear faster than your moat after the next Anthropic announcement\.  4:19 PM · Apr 17, 2026·1\.56K Views 2 Replies·3 Reposts·11 Likes](https://x.com/RafaelHajjar/status/2045175434787045449)We’re seeing some of these dynamics play out already in Ramp data\. Last month, some of the fastest\-growing[vendors](https://ramp.com/leading-indicators/top-saas-vendors-on-ramp-may-2026)on Ramp’s platform were AI inference platforms that give companies access to cheap, open\-source models\. And note OpenAI’s Codex is pretty good, does the same tasks more[cheaply](https://x.com/rahulgs/status/2048830174524063752), and the cost to switch between the models is minimal\. The two indicators I’ll be tracking closely next month will be OpenAI’s market share, including growth in subscriptions as more developers pick up Codex, and the growth in AI inference platforms for cheaper models\. [](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YPdX!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7ee436d5-5ea5-44db-93d7-a33f7632951a_3024x3024.jpeg) Tashkent Supermarket\. Please send a note if you’ve ever tried this mango ice cream — I’m curious about it\.