Data suggests Anthropic's latest feud with Trump admin may boost sales

Anthropic, the AI lab, surpassed OpenAI in business spending market share for the first time in May, according to Ramp data. The company raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation at the end of May and filed confidential IPO paperwork in June, reportedly on the strength of its first profitable quarter. However, on Friday, the Trump administration renewed its campaign against the model maker by demanding that non-Americans, including Anthropic employees, be banned from accessing its latest models: Mythos 5 and Fable 5. This forced Anthropic to pull the models from the market. Previously, in March, the administration declared Anthropic a supply-chain risk after the company refused to allow its models to be used for mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. That dispute did not deter business adoption; instead, it grew. Ramp's lead economist, Ara Kharazian, says the feud may even help: "If anything, it'll probably boost them. Anthropic’s best month on record, as far as business adoption, was the month that the Department of Defense labeled them a supply-chain risk. There’s a lot of aura that comes with your model specifically being named too dangerous to use."

Ramp’s data, from over 70,000 businesses, shows that Anthropic's share of AI subscriptions paid by businesses rose 2.5 percentage points in May to 41%, compared to OpenAI's 39.5% (essentially flat). Most business spending goes to API calls, especially for coding. Anthropic's Claude Opus model, particularly the latest version Opus 4.8, is popular. Mythos had been limited since April, and Fable 5 was shut down after a few days. While it's unclear how this new dispute will affect Anthropic's IPO plans, the numbers indicate that its available models are more popular with businesses than ever before.