Corporate America’s AI spending habits just flipped. Anthropic now claims 34.4% of businesses tracked by Ramp’s expense platform, edging past OpenAI‘s 32.3% for the first time since anyone started counting. This isn’t some survey of intentions or projected usage—it’s actual credit card data from over 50,000 companies buying AI subscriptions.
Anthropic’s growth trajectory defies conventional wisdom about AI market dominance.
The velocity here is staggering. Anthropic jumped from roughly 9% business adoption to the mid-30s in just one year, while OpenAI’s share actually declined. Even more telling: OpenAI suffered its largest single-month drop in February, losing 1.5 percentage points in what Ramp calls the biggest decline for any AI vendor since tracking began. Your procurement team probably felt this shift without realizing the broader pattern.
What This Data Actually Measures
Ramp tracks discrete AI purchases via business credit cards, not massive enterprise contracts.
The crucial caveat: Ramp’s index captures companies buying AI tools the way you’d purchase any SaaS subscription—through expense accounts and corporate cards. The massive enterprise deals that dominate headlines? Those don’t show up here.
This means Google appears artificially low (just 4.7%) because most businesses access their AI through bundled cloud services, not standalone subscriptions. Think of this data as showing which vendors win when businesses make deliberate, discrete AI purchasing decisions rather than accepting whatever comes bundled with their existing tech stack.
The Anthropic Strategy That’s Actually Working
Technical customers first, then expand outward—like Netflix building from streaming nerds to your parents.
“What Anthropic did worked really well,” Ramp economist Ara Kharazian told TechCrunch. “Start with a very technical customer base, focus on their needs, really succeed in execution and then start broadening out through tools like Cowork.” It’s the classic tech disruption playbook—win the power users, then follow them downstream.
The numbers back this up. Anthropic already dominates in finance, tech, and professional services, while winning approximately 70% of head-to-head matchups against OpenAI among first-time AI buyers. That’s the kind of momentum that compounds quickly in B2B markets, where word-of-mouth from technical teams carries enormous weight.
Despite these impressive metrics, even Kharazian remains skeptical that Anthropic’s lead will stick, noting that competitive responses and enterprise contract shifts could reshape everything. But for now, the trend is undeniable: businesses are voting with their wallets, and Claude is winning more votes than ChatGPT.
