Anthropic overtook OpenAI in U.S. business adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) tools for the first time in April 2026, according to data released on May 13 by Ramp, the corporate card and finance automation platform, and reported on May 15. The crossover reverses a years-long lead by OpenAI in enterprise spending on Large Language Model (LLM) services.
The numbers
<cite index="2-2,2-3,2-4">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%.</cite> <cite index="2-5">The index, published by Ramp, tracks spending patterns across more than 50,000 U.S. businesses</cite> using anonymized card and bill-pay data.
The shift caps a steep climb. <cite index="2-6">Anthropic has quadrupled its business adoption over the past year, while OpenAI grew its business adoption by only 0.3%.</cite> <cite index="2-8,2-9">The company's adoption figures show Anthropic climbing from 0.03% of businesses in June 2023 to 7.94% by April 2025, then rocketing to 34.44% by April 2026. OpenAI, meanwhile, peaked near 36.5% in mid-2025 and has been slowly declining since.</cite>
Ramp had previewed the trajectory weeks earlier. <cite index="2-12,2-13">Business Insider reported in April that the crossover was imminent. A Ramp spokesperson told the outlet that "at the current pace, Anthropic is on track to surpass OpenAI within the next two months,"</cite> citing leadership among venture-backed firms and in software, finance, and professional services.
Drivers
Much of the gap is attributable to a single product line. <cite index="2-10,2-11">Claude Code, the company's agentic AI coding tool, has become the fastest-growing product in Anthropic's history. A recent analysis estimated that 4% of all GitHub public commits worldwide were being authored by Claude Code — double the percentage from just one month prior.</cite>
Enterprise deployments illustrate the scale. <cite index="2-16,2-17">Uber's Chief Technology Officer revealed that the company spent its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months, largely on Claude Code and Cursor, with engineers reporting monthly Application Programming Interface (API) costs between $500 and $2,000 per person. Adoption jumped from 32% to 84% of Uber engineers in a matter of months, and about 70% of committed code at Uber now comes from AI.</cite>
Caveats and constraints
The report flags risks to Anthropic's new lead. <cite index="2-7">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.</cite>
Capacity strain is already visible. <cite index="2-20,2-21,2-22">Quality and reliability have suffered under the weight of demand. In recent weeks, users have experienced frequent outages, rate limits, and increasing dissatisfaction with Claude's results. Anthropic has responded by resetting usage limits and by striking a compute deal with SpaceX to access more than 300 megawatts of new capacity at the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis.</cite> <cite index="2-23">Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei said the company saw "80x growth per year in revenue and usage" for Q1 2026, when it had only planned for 10x.</cite>
Pricing changes may further complicate the picture. <cite index="2-24">Ramp economist Rafael Hajjar found that Anthropic's latest model update would triple token costs for any prompt that includes an image — a change that seems at odds with the company's already-acute cost and compute problems.</cite>
Ramp's index measures U.S. business adoption breadth via card and invoice data and does not capture cloud-marketplace contracts negotiated directly with hyperscalers, meaning published shares may understate revenue concentrated in large committed-spend agreements.