Anthropic quietly captured over 60% of business AI API spending, leaving OpenAI with roughly 35%

The conventional wisdom that OpenAI dominates the AI market needs an asterisk. When you zoom into where businesses actually swipe their corporate cards for API access, Anthropic is running away with it, capturing north of 60% of spending while OpenAI sits at around 35%.

That spending gap looks even more dramatic when you consider how it’s being generated. According to Vercel AI Gateway data, Anthropic is pulling in that 61-65% spending share on just 30-32% of total token volume. That means Anthropic is charging roughly 4.4 times the average price per token compared to OpenAI.

How the tables turned

Rewind to 2023, and Anthropic held a modest 12% of enterprise LLM spend. OpenAI was sitting comfortably at around 50%. Fast forward to December 2025, and a Menlo Ventures survey showed Anthropic had climbed to 40% of enterprise LLM expenditures while OpenAI had slid to 27%.

That trajectory only accelerated into 2026. Ramp’s sales data from the same period showed Anthropic capturing 34.4-44% of business AI spending versus OpenAI’s 32.3-40%. By mid-2026, the Vercel data tells an even starker story, with Anthropic pulling above 60%.

The reversal happened fastest in one category: coding. Anthropic now holds approximately 54% of the enterprise coding and agentic applications market. OpenAI managed just 21% in that same segment.

Average spending per user tells its own story. Anthropic users spend roughly $420 on average, compared to $310 for OpenAI users.

Different strategies, different moats

Anthropic’s enterprise and API revenue mix stands at approximately 80%, meaning the vast majority of its money comes from businesses integrating Claude into their products and workflows.

OpenAI, by contrast, has built a large consumer product in ChatGPT. Its consumer-scale reach gives it a different kind of leverage: volume. OpenAI’s broader product ecosystem, from ChatGPT Enterprise to its Azure partnership, gives it distribution channels that pure API metrics don’t capture.

The multi-model reality

One data point complicates any simple narrative about winners and losers: 67% of development teams now use multiple AI providers. Teams route their hardest, most valuable work to Claude — the complex coding tasks, the multi-step agentic workflows — while simpler, high-volume tasks get sent to cheaper alternatives.

Some Ramp data showed stronger growth for OpenAI in certain business cohorts during Q3 2026, suggesting the company hasn’t ceded the enterprise fight entirely.

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