Anthropic Tops OpenAI in Business Spending Share
Key insights
- Ramp's index uses actual enterprise payment data, not surveys, making this a harder adoption signal than most competitive benchmarks.
- Claude Code growth over two quarters is the primary driver cited for Anthropic's enterprise spending overtaking OpenAI.
- This is the first time Anthropic has led OpenAI on a payment-based business adoption metric, not just developer sentiment surveys.
Why this matters
Enterprise CFOs and procurement teams increasingly route AI spend through platforms like Ramp, meaning Ramp's transaction data is one of the least gameable proxies for real commercial traction in the market. Founders and technical leaders building on top of AI infrastructure should treat this as a signal that enterprise buyers are shifting default provider assumptions, which affects which APIs get integrated into new products and which vendor relationships get negotiated at the board level. For OpenAI, losing the payment-data lead even briefly validates that Claude's enterprise push is structurally competitive, not just a marketing narrative, and that the developer tooling layer is a meaningful commercial lever.
Summary
Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI in business adoption for the first time, according to Ramp's May 2026 AI Leading Indicators index, which tracks actual enterprise card spending rather than survey responses or self-reported data.
The shift is notable because Ramp's methodology cuts through marketing noise: if companies are spending more on Anthropic products than OpenAI products across Ramp's enterprise network, that's a hard payment signal. The inflection point traces back to rapid growth in Claude Code and broader enterprise deployments over the past two quarters, suggesting the developer-tooling push is converting into sustained commercial spend.
Essentially: (Anthropic, OpenAI) are now in a genuine commercial horse race, with Anthropic holding the lead for the first time on a payment-based metric.
- Ramp's index uses transaction data across its enterprise spending network, not survey responses, making it one of the cleaner proxies for real adoption.
- Claude Code growth over the past two quarters is the primary driver cited for the inflection.
- The timing follows Anthropic topping CNBC's Disruptor 50 list by weeks, compounding the competitive signal.
OpenAI still holds broader consumer and API mindshare, but the enterprise spending gap has now closed and flipped on at least one hard metric.
Potential risks and opportunities
Risks
- OpenAI could accelerate its own developer-tooling layer (Codex, Operator) aggressively in Q3 2026 to recapture enterprise spending share before Anthropic's lead compounds into multi-year contracts.
- If Ramp's network turns out to be structurally overweighted toward Anthropic-friendly sectors, the index could overclaim a competitive shift that doesn't hold in a broader enterprise audit, damaging Ramp's credibility as a market signal source.
- Anthropic's enterprise infrastructure may face scaling stress if adoption accelerates faster than capacity, risking SLA failures for newly signed enterprise customers in the next 60-90 days.
Opportunities
- Enterprise software vendors building Claude integrations (Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow) gain negotiating leverage with Anthropic for preferred partnership terms while OpenAI's share is under pressure.
- Ramp and similar B2B spend analytics platforms (Brex, Zip) can productize AI vendor benchmarking reports as a recurring enterprise intelligence offering, given demand for hard spend-based signals.
- Consulting firms and system integrators (Accenture, Deloitte) with Claude implementation practices can use this data point to accelerate enterprise pitches that had been stalled on OpenAI-vs-Anthropic vendor selection.
What we don't know yet
- Whether Ramp's network skews toward any particular industry vertical (e.g., fintech, SaaS) that could make the adoption gap larger or smaller than the broader Fortune 500 picture.
- How OpenAI's enterprise contract structure (multi-year ELAs vs. consumption-based billing) affects whether Ramp card spend accurately captures OpenAI's actual enterprise revenue relative to Anthropic's.
- Whether the Claude Code spending spike reflects net-new enterprise customers or existing OpenAI customers migrating spend, which would indicate churn risk for OpenAI rather than market expansion.
Originally reported by ramp.com
Read the original article →Original headline: Anthropic Overtakes OpenAI in Business Adoption for the First Time, Ramp AI Index Finds