For the first time since the AI race began, more American businesses are paying for Anthropic’s Claude than for OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Adoption of Anthropic rose 3.8% in April to 34.4% of businesses, according to the May 2026 release of the Ramp AI Index. OpenAI’s adoption fell 2.9% to 32.3%. Overall AI adoption among businesses rose 0.2 percentage points to 50.6%.The crossover — published Tuesday by Ramp, the corporate card and finance automation platform that tracks spending patterns across more than 50,000 U.S. businesses — marks the culmination of a yearlong surge by Anthropic that few in the industry predicted. Anthropic has quadrupled its business adoption over the past year, while OpenAI grew its business adoption by only 0.3%.But the same report that crowns a new market leader also warns that Anthropic’s position may be more fragile than it appears — threatened by escalating costs, compute constraints, and the very token-based pricing model that has fueled the company’s extraordinary revenue growth.How Anthropic went from a niche player to the most popular AI model in corporate AmericaTo appreciate the scale of the shift, consider where the two companies stood a year ago. In April 2025, OpenAI commanded roughly 32% of business AI adoption according to Ramp’s underlying data, while Anthropic stood at under 8%. OpenAI had built an early, commanding lead as the consumer default — ChatGPT was where most people first encountered AI, and that momentum carried into corporate purchasing decisions.Anthropic’s path was different. The company was popular early on with the earliest adopters — engineers, AI evangelists, the technical vanguard inside organizations. As Ramp lead economist Ara Kharazian noted in the March 2026 edition of the index, Anthropic leveraged that early-adopter base to go mainstream. By Februa …
