OpenAI Is Winning Back Business Customers From Anthropic

Where this data comes from

A company called Ramp makes corporate credit cards and expense-tracking software used by tens of thousands of American businesses. Because Ramp can see what its business customers are actually paying for, it can track — in rough percentage terms — which AI companies are winning more of that spending over time. It's not a perfect measurement of the whole market, but it's a useful real-world signal.

The seesaw between OpenAI and Anthropic

Back in May, Anthropic (the company behind the Claude chatbot) had actually pulled ahead of OpenAI among these business customers, and by July its lead had grown even further. Now, that trend appears to be reversing — OpenAI is picking up market share again heading into the second half of the year.

Why the swing happened

According to an economist at Ramp, OpenAI's newest model performed strongly with business users. Meanwhile, Anthropic's newest release apparently disappointed people — partly because of its price, and partly because of a new rule requiring Anthropic to hold onto certain customer data for a set period of time, which made some businesses uneasy about privacy.

The bigger takeaway

Even with the back-and-forth, both companies are actually growing overall — the share of Ramp's business customers paying for any AI service at all climbed from about half in March to well over half by July. In other words, this isn't really a story about AI losing steam; it's a story about how fast customer loyalty can flip between two competing giants when a single new product release or a single policy change lands the wrong way.