Corporate spending data collected by the Ramp platform indicates that Anthropic surpassed OpenAI for the first time in its share of commercial spending on AI services during May, as the company was undergoing a series of major developments and political pressures. According to the data, Anthropic’s share of companies’ AI subscriptions rose by 2.5 percentage points during the month to reach 41%, compared with 39.5% for OpenAI, whose share remained roughly stable.
The figures come shortly after a period in which Anthropic raised about $65 billion at a valuation of $965 billion at the end of May, surpassing OpenAI, according to the source, and then submitted confidential filings in preparation for an initial public offering in June, amid reports that it had achieved its first profitable quarter. These developments also coincided with a new escalation in its dispute with the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
The Mythos and Fable 5 Model Crisis
On the Friday before the report was published, the Trump administration sent Anthropic a letter demanding that it prevent non-Americans, including the company’s employees, from accessing its advanced models. The request covered the Mythos 5 model, which had been available on a limited basis, and the more restricted version that the company had released to the public three days earlier under the name Fable 5.
This effectively led to Anthropic’s latest powerful model being withdrawn from the market. The White House cited an uncommon directive related to export controls, but the precise reason for the decision remained unclear in the article. One explanation circulating was that hackers had easily managed to bypass the safeguards in Fable 5, which were designed to prevent access to Mythos’s capabilities.
Anthropic had presented Mythos as exceptionally powerful at detecting vulnerabilities in code, and marketed it as a dangerous model while restricting its public availability. According to the source, Fable 5 remained on the market for only a few days, while Mythos had been available to a limited number of users since April.
The Political Dispute Has Not Halted Corporate Adoption
The dispute between Anthropic and the U.S. government extends to the company’s refusal to allow its models to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons. In March, the Trump administration declared the company a “supply-chain risk.” However, Ramp’s data does not indicate a decline in Anthropic’s corporate sales following that designation; instead, it shows growth in commercial adoption.
Ara Khazrazian, Ramp’s chief economist and the person who compiled the AI spending data, said the latest dispute could benefit the company rather than harm it. The source quoted him as saying that Anthropic’s best month in terms of corporate adoption was the month in which the Department of Defense designated the company a supply-chain risk, adding that labeling the model too dangerous to use could give it a certain “halo.”
This interpretation represents Khazrazian’s opinion and does not by itself prove that the political dispute caused demand to increase. Ramp’s data also lacks enough detail to determine the financial loss that might result from withdrawing Mythos and Fable 5 from the market.
Opus and Claude Code Drive Spending
Ramp’s data, based on more than 70,000 companies using its platform, indicates that customers are using Anthropic’s Opus models extensively and that enterprise use of the company’s services is expanding. Most corporate spending does not involve subscriptions alone; the largest portion goes to API calls, which cover token consumption in tasks including programming.
Claude Code has a strong reputation as an advanced AI programming tool. Ramp cannot identify the model used in every transaction, but it can see it in roughly one-third of transactions. In those cases, companies mostly spend on different versions of Claude Opus, particularly the newer versions. Opus was the model that preceded Mythos and remains openly available.
In late May, Anthropic launched a new version of Opus called Opus 4.8. This point is important when interpreting the spending data, because Anthropic’s popularity among companies does not necessarily depend on the withdrawn Mythos or the Fable 5 model that was discontinued after a short period; instead, it relies to a large extent on models that are already available and products such as Claude Code.
Potential Impact on the Public Offering
The figures show that Anthropic’s currently available models have become more popular among companies, but they do not allow for a complete forecast of the outcome of the new dispute with the White House. It remains unclear whether withdrawing Mythos and Fable 5 will affect the company’s ability to carry out the initial public offering for which it has prepared.
Public-market investors may be more cautious toward companies involved in disputes with the government, but the source provides no evidence of how this would specifically affect Anthropic. At the same time, continued growth in enterprise adoption gives the company a positive commercial indicator, even as the repercussions of the political and regulatory dispute remain unresolved.