A year ago, Anthropic was a name that mostly came up in conversations with software developers and AI researchers. Most businesses had not heard of it, and those that had were using it as a supplement to OpenAI, not a replacement. That is no longer the case.
Spending data from Ramp, which tracks corporate payments across more than 50,000 businesses, now shows Anthropic ahead of OpenAI in the share of companies paying for AI services. The margin is thin, 34.4% versus 32.3%, but this is the first time the position has flipped. And the trend behind it has been building steadily for over a year.
Anthropic's customer count grew roughly 26 percentage points over 12 months. Over the same period, OpenAI's share dropped by 1 point. That divergence is the story. One company is still roughly where it was. The other has gone from a niche tool to mainstream business software in the time it takes to complete a typical office renovation project.
The reason comes down to a deliberate sequence. Anthropic spent 2024 and most of 2025 winning the trust of developers, data teams, and technical professionals, the people inside companies who influence what software gets purchased. Once those users made Claude a daily habit, the business case for a paid company subscription became easy to make internally. Finance, legal, operations, and other non-technical teams followed. The strategy worked because internal champions are far more persuasive than any sales pitch.
The product that is now accelerating that expansion into non-technical teams is called Cowork. It is a desktop tool that can take on multi-step tasks autonomously, things like turning scattered meeting notes into a formatted report, reorganising folders, or pulling data from multiple sources into a single summary. It requires no technical skill to use. The user describes the outcome they want and Cowork handles the steps. Anthropic built it by taking the capabilities of their developer tool, Claude Code, and wrapping them in an interface that anyone in an office can use without any training.
This matters because it changes who Anthropic is competing for. Until recently, winning a company meant winning the IT department or a team of engineers. Now Anthropic is competing for the daily workflows of procurement managers, operations directors, legal analysts, and finance teams globally.
The revenue picture confirms that this is not just a count-of-customers story. Anthropic crossed a $30 billion annualised revenue run rate earlier this year, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. Over 1,000 enterprise clients now spend more than $1 million a year on Claude, a figure that doubled in under two months. Eight of the ten largest companies in the world are now Claude customers.
For comparison, OpenAI still has more than one million businesses using its products and reported over $20 billion in annualised revenue in 2025. It is not a company in trouble. But it is a company that took its foot off the enterprise pedal while it focused on consumer products and cost management, and Anthropic filled that gap decisively. OpenAI is now actively rebuilding its enterprise sales operations.
The important nuance is that most businesses paying for Anthropic are still also paying for OpenAI. About 79% of Anthropic's customers pay for both. Different teams inside the same company are using different tools. The real test comes when companies decide to consolidate onto one provider. At that point, whoever has deeper roots across more departments, not just the technical ones, will have the advantage. Anthropic's move into non-technical workflows through Cowork is clearly designed to win that consolidation decision before it happens.