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Anthropic leads OpenAI by 2.9 points overall, 7.4 among the heaviest AI spenders

Ramp's June card-spend index puts open-source and Chinese model serving in firms spending $248 per employee, 23 times the median. The cheap-model migration is starting at the top.

The Investor · Invest desk

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What happened

  • Ramp's June 2026 index has Anthropic up 1.4 points to 42.4% of businesses, still the leader in business adoption.
  • OpenAI was essentially flat, edging down 0.1 points to 39.5%.
  • Use of model-serving platforms, Ramp's proxy for open-source and Chinese models, reached 5.8% of AI-spending businesses in June, from 4.5% in January.
  • In that same group, 96.4% were still buying from OpenAI or Anthropic.

Why it matters

  • What it limits constraint No pricing pressure has surfaced in the labs' behaviour, so a budget built on frontier prices falling this year is pricing an event the spend data does not yet support.
  • Who's exposed exposure Anthropic sits deeper inside the cohort best equipped to route work elsewhere, so it, not OpenAI, has more to lose if substitution ever starts in earnest.
  • What's now possible capability For the heaviest spenders, multi-model access is an addition on top of frontier accounts, which makes the live budget question routing and orchestration rather than vendor replacement.
  • What it sets up precedent The signal that cheap models have gone mainstream will be adopters dropping incumbent accounts, not more firms opening a model-serving one.

Anthropic's penetration of the model-serving cohort is 93.2%, OpenAI's 85.8% [9][8]. That is a 7.4 point spread [13] inside the most AI-intensive firms Ramp can see, against 2.9 points across businesses generally [3], so the lead is roughly two and a half times wider at the sophisticated end than in the market as a whole [14]. For anyone modelling where the enterprise developer relationship settles, that asymmetry carries more information than the headline crossover.

Ramp's proxy is card spend on model-serving platforms, which resell access to hundreds of models, and it says plainly the proxy is imperfect [11]. Take it at face value and these users are the opposite of a budget cohort. Annualise June and the median model-serving user is running about $2,976 of AI spend per employee per year, against roughly $127 for the median AI-spending business [16]. The cohort's median was also up 21% month over month [7]; compounded across a year that is 9.8x [17], which nothing sustains, but the sign is the point. Cheaper tokens are arriving as more work attempted rather than smaller invoices, which is Ramp's own reading of it [19].

The pricing inference is where the money sits. Ramp argues the absence of broad price cuts from the American labs is itself evidence they have not lost meaningful business share [20]. That only holds if the labs would cut in response to share loss rather than to their own margin arithmetic, and it leaves the burden of proof on the cheap-model thesis: five months of movement added 1.3 points of AI-spending businesses, a 29% relative gain off a small base [18], and only 3.6% of the firms doing it have stopped buying from OpenAI or Anthropic altogether [15].

Ramp's stated outlook is bearish on Chinese models winning broad American adoption, citing adoption that stays low and concentrated among AI-intensive firms plus the incumbents' distribution, product and trust advantages [21], while conceding that sensitivity to frontier pricing is real and cheaper alternatives are attractive for specific tasks [22]. The labs named in that discourse are DeepSeek, Alibaba and Moonshot AI [12]. One limit worth holding in view: because the index is built from spend [1], a firm counts as a model-serving user when it has a vendor relationship, not when any measurable share of its tokens has actually moved. Vendor counts move earlier and more easily than workloads do, which means the 5.8% figure is the loosest possible reading of migration, and it is still small [5].

What to watch

  • Whether the overlap figures fall in Ramp's next monthly index, which would mark substitution rather than addition.
  • Whether any American lab announces broad price cuts, the move Ramp treats as the tell for lost business share.
  • Whether model-serving adoption spreads out of the high-spend cohort into firms nearer the $10.59 per-employee median.

Information, not investment advice. This story is general information about companies and markets, drawn from cited reporting. It is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security; check the cited sources before acting.

Clarity's read

What the record supports and how the coverage leans. The claims behind it follow.

Reality

Evidence42
Adoption28
Hype gap+18
Incentives62
Confidence40
Why these scores

Claim ledger

Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.

  1. [1]

    The Ramp AI Index is research using spend data from Ramp to track how American businesses are using AI.

    Reported Supported Source: RampView cited source
  2. [2]

    Anthropic rose 1.4 percentage points to 42.4% of businesses, remaining the leader in business adoption.

    Reported Supported Source: Ramp AI Index, July 2026 letterView cited source
  3. [3]

    Anthropic now leads OpenAI by 2.9 percentage points in business adoption.

    Reported Supported Source: RampView cited source

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Sources

1 independent publisher whose own reporting we read for this story.

  1. ramp.com

    1 article · August 23, 2026

    Ramp's latest data on China vs. the American AI Labs

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