Catenaa, Friday, August 21, 2026- Ramp released new spending data showing OpenAI is growing faster than Anthropic among US business users so far in the third quarter.
As of July, 43.5% of the more than 70,000 U.S. businesses tracked by Ramp paid for Anthropic subscriptions or tokens, up 1.1 percentage points from the prior month.
OpenAI reached 39.7%, gaining only 0.23 percentage points over the same period. But Ramp economist Ara Kharazian said OpenAI has expanded faster than Anthropic in Q3 to date, according to TechCrunch.
This narrows a gap that has widened since Anthropic overtook OpenAI in market share this past May.
“GPT-5.6 Sol is really good, increasingly the choice for developers,” Kharazian posted on X. “Fable 5, meanwhile, disappointed both in adoption and real-world application given price plus data retention requirements imposed by regulators,” he said.
The data points to the difficulty Anthropic has had converting the launch of its Fable 5 model into business spending.
Over the past month, Fable 5 accounted for only 6% of tokens businesses purchased from Anthropic and 11.4% of dollars spent on Anthropic models, according to Ramp.
By comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol made up 25% of OpenAI tokens and 23% of spend. In dollar terms, Fable 5 generated roughly 75% as much model-attributed spending as GPT-5.6 Sol in July.
Ramp attributed part of Fable 5’s underperformance to its price. At roughly $10 per million tokens, about twice the cost of GPT-5.6 Sol, businesses have shown limited appetite for the more expensive model, according to Ramp.
Anthropic separately sparked backlash after notifying Fable users that the company is required to hold onto their data for a month, according to TechCrunch.
The broader data suggests volatility in enterprise AI spending rather than settled loyalty to either company.
Among Ramp-tracked businesses, the share paying for AI climbed to nearly 56% in July from just over 50% in March, though momentum behind both OpenAI and Anthropic has cooled as enterprises increasingly experiment with open-source and cheaper model options.
The share of AI-using businesses on Ramp that use model-serving platforms providing access to open-source models rose to 6.1% in July, up 0.2 percentage points from the prior month.
The figures cover only companies that run expenses through Ramp’s platform, leaving out large enterprises that rely on other spend-management providers, so the data offers a meaningful but incomplete window into the broader market.
The competitive dynamics play out against a backdrop of widening financial divergence between the two companies.
Anthropic posted $11.6 billion in second-quarter revenue, surpassing OpenAI for the first time, while OpenAI recorded $6.7 billion over the same period, according to CNBC and The Wall Street Journal.
OpenAI’s operating loss reached $12.3 billion in the second quarter, while Anthropic recorded a small adjusted operating profit, according to SiliconAngle.
OpenAI has said momentum improved after it introduced new models in July. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told employees that annualized recurring revenue in July had already exceeded the company’s full second-quarter total, crediting the GPT-5.6 model series, an enterprise agent called ChatGPT Work, and its Codex coding tool.
