Anthropic's Best Month Ever

Anthropic's latest feud with the Trump administration may have just given the AI lab a boost in sales. Ramp's data suggests that the company's business spending on AI models has increased, despite the government's efforts to restrict access to its state-of-the-art models.

A Surprising Boost in Sales

The Trump administration's latest move to ban non-Americans, including Anthropic's employees, from accessing its models has essentially forced the company to pull its latest all-powerful model from the market altogether. However, despite this setback, Anthropic's sales to businesses have seen a significant increase. Ramp's data shows that Anthropic's share of AI subscriptions paid for by businesses rose 2.5 percentage points in May to 41%. This compares to OpenAI, which commanded 39.5% of AI subscriptions by its customers, essentially flat from the prior month.

"If anything, it'll probably boost them," Kharazian told TechCrunch. "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."

What's Driving the Growth

Ramp's data shows that customers heavily use Anthropic's Opus models and that business use has been growing. For instance, Ramp reported that Anthropic's share of AI subscriptions paid for by businesses rose 2.5 percentage points in May to 41%. This compares to OpenAI, which commanded 39.5% of AI subscriptions by its customers, essentially flat from the prior month. Beyond subscriptions, the vast majority of what companies spend money on is API calls to the model, which cover token use for activities like coding. Anthropic's Claude Code has a strong reputation as a powerful AI coding tool.

• Businesses are mostly spending on various flavors of Claude Opus, particularly the later versions.
• Opus is the model that preceded Mythos and is still openly available.
• In fact, in late May, Anthropic released a new version, Opus 4.8.

The Future of Anthropic

While we can't predict how this latest drama with the White House will impact Anthropic's ability to go public as it hoped to (public-market investors tend to be wary of companies embroiled in controversies with the government), the numbers indicate that Anthropic's available models are more popular with businesses than ever before. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.