OpenAI is closing the gap with Anthropic among business buyers, card data suggests
Ramp's spending data puts Anthropic ahead at about 44% to OpenAI's 40% in July, with OpenAI growing faster this quarter — on a sample that skews to tech.
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- Corporate card provider Ramp put Anthropic at roughly 44% of its customers' AI vendor spend in July against OpenAI's 40%, from 41% and 39% respectively in May.
- OpenAI is growing faster than Anthropic so far in the third quarter, according to the same data.
- Nearly 56% of Ramp's business customers paid for AI services in July, up from 50% in March.
- The sample covers more than 70,000 American businesses but excludes large enterprises using rival spend-management providers, and skews toward technology firms.
Data from corporate card and expense provider Ramp indicates OpenAI is narrowing Anthropic's lead among business buyers. Anthropic held roughly 44% of AI vendor spend across Ramp's customer base in July against OpenAI's 40%, having been at 41% and 39% in May — a gap that widened before beginning to close, with OpenAI growing faster through the third quarter to date.
The broader figure in the same dataset is the adoption rate: nearly 56% of Ramp's business customers were paying for AI services in July, up from 50% in March. That is the number underneath both vendors' growth, and it suggests the contest between them is still being fought over an expanding pool of buyers rather than over each other's existing customers.
The sample's limits are substantial and worth stating plainly. Ramp covers more than 70,000 American businesses but does not capture large enterprises that use spend-management tools from providers such as American Express, and its customer base skews toward the technology industry, where both vendors' developer products are most heavily used. Ramp declined to provide dollar figures, sharing only percentages. An economist quoted by TechCrunch cautioned that with a month left in the quarter — "that's like 30 AI years" — the trend could shift again.
The reading also sits against Anthropic's reported revenue lead: the Wall Street Journal put its second-quarter revenue at $11.6bn against OpenAI's $6.7bn, a gap this paper covered on 19 August. Share of buyers and share of revenue are different measures, and a vendor can lead on one while trailing on the other.
Card-spend panels are a leading indicator precisely because they capture the small and mid-sized buyers who switch quickly, and the tech skew that makes the sample unrepresentative of the whole economy makes it more informative about developer tooling specifically. For anyone choosing a vendor to standardise on, the signal here is that neither lead is settled enough to treat as permanent — and that the adoption rate climbing from 50% to 56% in four months matters more than which of the two is briefly ahead.