For months, Anthropic has owned the corporate AI crowd. Now the lead is shrinking.
New data from Ramp, a company that tracks spending for businesses, shows OpenAI is gaining ground fast among paying customers. The race is closer than it has been all year.
The Numbers Behind the Shift
Ramp published fresh figures on AI spending from the companies that use its corporate cards and expense tools. The dataset covers more than 70,000 American businesses, and it shows a clear trend.
OpenAI had led this group before, but it lost the top spot in May and has not gotten it back since.
Why OpenAI Is Gaining Ground
The reason for the comeback appears to come down to product quality. Kharazian has been blunt about what he is seeing.
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"GPT-5.6 Sol is really good, increasingly the choice for developers," he wrote on X. He was less kind to Anthropic's premium model, saying "Fable 5, meanwhile, disappointed both in adoption and real-world application given price + data retention requirements imposed by regulators."
Fable is Anthropic's high-end model tier. It is costly and built for specific, niche business tasks rather than everyday chatbot use. Anthropic also took heat after telling Fable users it would keep their data for 30 days, a policy that spooked some corporate customers.
The takeaway for businesses is simple. Companies are not locked into one AI provider. As each lab ships new models, customers are willing to switch sides.
This shifting loyalty reflects a broader maturation of the AI market. The fact that OpenAI, once the runaway leader, lost its lead to Anthropic in May and has not regained it signals that buyers are evaluating tools on merit rather than brand inertia. Ramp's data also shows that the share of businesses paying for AI has climbed steadily since the start of the year, crossing the 50% threshold in March and reaching nearly 56% by July.
That suggests the competitive pressure is expanding the pie, not just redistributing existing slices. For early adopters, the constant churn means better products and more choices; for vendors, it means no lead is safe.
What This Means for Your Portfolio
A few caveats are worth keeping in mind before you read too much into these numbers.
Ramp's customer base leans heavily toward tech companies because of its popularity in Silicon Valley. The data also skips large enterprises that use other spend-management platforms like American Express. And Ramp only shared percentages, not actual dollar amounts, so the true revenue picture is fuzzy.
Still, the broader trend is hard to ignore. The overall AI market among Ramp customers is expanding, not shrinking.
That tells you something important. Even as the two leading labs fight for the same customers, the pie itself is getting bigger. More businesses are willing to pay for AI tools every quarter, and the competition between OpenAI and Anthropic is pushing both to ship better products faster.
For investors, the lesson is about momentum, not loyalty. This market is still young enough that today's leader can be tomorrow's follower. Watching which company wins business customers quarter to quarter gives you a clearer read on who is actually building tools people want to use - not just who has the biggest headlines.
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