anthropic vs. openai

2026-05-15 · Source: Matthew Berman · Field: Finance & Economics — Economic Analysis & Policy, FinTech & Digital Financial Services, Capital Markets & Investment Management · Depth: Intermediate, extended

Summary

Ramp's Chief Economist, Ara Khazarian, discusses the competitive landscape and revenue growth of OpenAI and Anthropic, particularly their penetration into the enterprise sector. Ramp's unique dataset, covering $100 billion in annual spend across 50,000 businesses, provides granular insights into AI adoption, including specific models used and spend patterns. The analysis reveals a significant shift in enterprise AI adoption, with Anthropic surpassing OpenAI in new customer acquisition by January 2026, driven by its focus on technical users and expansion into non-technical use cases with products like Claude Co-work. Despite a Department of Defense designation as a security threat, Anthropic's growth accelerated. The discussion also touches on the increasing spend on AI APIs, the primary use case being coding and AI-powered product experiences, and the emerging trend of companies opting for cheaper, more efficient models and model routing platforms to manage escalating AI budgets.

Key takeaway

For CTOs and VPs of Engineering managing AI investments, recognize that the competitive landscape between frontier AI models is highly dynamic, with Anthropic recently outpacing OpenAI in new enterprise adoption. Your teams should prioritize implementing model routing strategies and exploring cheaper, specialized models to optimize costs and performance, as reliance on single, expensive frontier models may become unsustainable given rapid spend increases and evolving product offerings.

Key insights

Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI in new enterprise AI adoption, driven by targeted technical focus and broader non-technical applications.

Principles

• AI spend is a small but rapidly growing line item for businesses.
• Early adopters of AI are primarily tech, finance, and professional services.
• Switching costs between AI models are effectively zero.

Method

Ramp tracks AI adoption and spend by analyzing transaction data, including receipts and invoices, from 50,000 businesses, allowing for model-level insights and trend predictions.

In practice

• Consider cheaper AI models for less performant tasks.
• Explore model routing platforms to optimize cost and performance.
• Diversify AI vendors beyond frontier model providers.

Topics

• AI Enterprise Adoption
• OpenAI Anthropic Competition
• AI Spend Analytics
• Model Routing Optimization
• AI Productivity ROI

Best for: CTO, VP of Engineering/Data, Executive, Director of AI/ML, Consultant, Investor

Related on AIssential

• The Intelligence Factory: OpenAI vs Anthropic — OpenAI and Anthropic pursue distinct financial strategies for AI dominance, revealed in their confidential investor documents.
• The enterprise shift OpenAI saw coming — Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI in enterprise AI adoption, driven by a significant surge in business usage.
• Anthropic vs. OpenAI, the Pre IPO Days — Anthropic is rapidly gaining market share and revenue against OpenAI, driven by enterprise focus and agentic AI advancements.
• AI News Weekly - Issue #467: Anthropic has receipts. And nobody wants to pay for AI. - Feb 26th 2026 — Despite immense investment and rapid technological advancement, AI faces significant adoption, monetization, and geopolitical challenges.
• Anthropic's Closed Harness Bet — Anthropic is strategically crossing the AI adoption chasm by targeting the early majority with practical, affordable solutions.
• Anthropic's Revenue Leap Over OpenAI — Anthropic's enterprise focus and efficient models have propelled it past OpenAI in revenue, reshaping the AI competitive landscape.

Open in AIssential →

Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by Matthew Berman.