For the first time since the generative AI race began, more American businesses are paying for Claude than for ChatGPT. The May 2026 release of the Ramp AI Index — which tracks spending across more than 50,000 US businesses — shows Anthropic's business adoption rose 3.8 points in April to 34.4%, while OpenAI's fell 2.9 points to 32.3%. Overall AI adoption among tracked firms climbed to 50.6%.
The trajectory behind the crossover is steep. Anthropic's business adoption went from 0.03% in June 2023 to 7.94% by April 2025, then to 34.4% by April 2026. OpenAI peaked near 36.5% in mid-2025 and has slowly declined since. Ramp credits much of Anthropic's surge to Claude Code, now the fastest-growing product in the company's history, with one estimate putting 4% of all public GitHub commits as Claude Code-authored — double the share from a month earlier.
The picture is not uniformly bullish. A separate IDC survey of more than 1,000 organizations from March 2026 found only 19% reported extensive use of Claude, still trailing OpenAI and Google, with another 25% actively evaluating it. The two datasets measure different things: Ramp captures which vendor a business actually pays for (a binary adoption signal from card and expense data), while IDC self-reports depth of usage, where OpenAI's longer tenure and Google's Workspace bundling carry weight.
Read together, the reports suggest Anthropic is winning the new-adoption battle while still building toward parity on depth-of-use inside organizations that onboarded earlier vendors first. VentureBeat's coverage cautions the lead may be fragile, citing escalating compute costs, capacity constraints, and the token-based pricing model that fueled the growth as threats that could push cost-sensitive teams back toward cheaper alternatives.
Source: [VentureBeat](https://venturebeat.com/technology/anthropic-finally-beat-openai-in-business-ai-adoption-but-3-big-threats-could-erase-its-lead)