Anthropic Overtakes OpenAI in Enterprise Adoption Rate

In the May update of the Ramp AI Index, Anthropic overtook OpenAI for the first time to claim the No. 1 spot in U.S. enterprise adoption. Based on Ramp's corporate card and invoice payment data, Anthropic's April adoption rate rose to 34.4%, while OpenAI's fell to 32.3%. Overall AI adoption stood at 50.6%, up 0.2 percentage points.

Over the past year, Anthropic's enterprise adoption grew 4x, while OpenAI's growth was just 0.3%. The software market is moving fast enough to flip in a matter of months, with the pace of product updates mattering more than vendor lock-in.

However, Anthropic's lead doesn't necessarily mean a settled leadership position. There are three headwinds.

• Incentive problem: Anthropic's revenue grows as enterprises use more tokens, giving it an incentive to push customers toward more expensive models. Uber's CTO has already said it exceeded its 2026 AI budget.
• Claude quality decline: Recently, users have experienced frequent outages, rate limits, and degraded performance. Anthropic reset usage limits in April, and a new contract with SpaceX is expected to ease short-term compute constraints.
• Cost deterioration: Rafael Hajjar of Econ Lab pointed out that the latest model update tripled the token cost for prompts that include images.

Ramp's data also showed growth among AI inference platforms offering cheaper open-source models. OpenAI's Codex can handle the same tasks more cheaply with lower switching costs, so next month the key thing to watch will be how subscription growth and the spread of low-cost model platforms affect market share.