Anthropic is one month old.
AI Lab finished May surpassing OpenAI in market share in business spending for the first time, just Ramp was revealed. It raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation (also beating OpenAI) in late May, then launched in June by filing confidential documents for an IPO, reportedly on the strength of its first profitable quarter.
Then on Friday, the Trump administration renewed its war on the model maker by sending a letter demanding that it ban non-Americans, including Anthropic employees, from access to its state-of-the-art models: the limited-release Mythos 5 and the more guarded version of the Mythos released to the public three days earlier, called the Fable 5.
This essentially forced Anthropic to completely withdraw its latest powerful model from the market.
Although the White House cited an unclear export control directive when it ordered the ban, the exact reason remains unclear. The chatter was that hackers easily bypassed Fable 5’s guardrails, which were meant to block access to Mythos features. This model is so good at finding security flaws in software code that Anthropic itself released it as dangerous and restricted its public release.
This new drama comes after Anthropic famously refused to allow the government to use its models for mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons. As a result, in March, the Trump administration declared the company a supply chain risk.
That hasn’t stopped Anthropic from selling to businesses. Ramp’s data shows the opposite. Ironically, this latest spat with the Trump administration, which also seems to validate the hype about Myth’s mythological power, may help rather than hurt Anthropic, according to Ramp chief economist Ara Kharazian. Kharazian is the person who collected the AI data on business spending.
“If anything, it will probably stimulate them,” Kharazian told TechCrunch. “Anthropic’s best month on record, in terms of enterprise adoption, was the month they were designated a supply chain risk by the Department of Defense. There’s a lot of buzz when your model is called particularly dangerous to use.”
Ramp’s data isn’t detailed enough to see how much of a financial hit the company will take by pulling Mythos and Fable 5 from the market.
However, data from more than 70,000 businesses using its platform shows that customers are heavily using Anthropic’s Opus models and business usage is growing.
For example, Ramp reported that Anthropic’s share of AI subscriptions paid by businesses rose 2.5 percentage points in May to 41%. This compares to OpenAI, which had 39.5% of AI subscriptions from its customers, essentially flat from the previous month. (OpenAI is still well ahead of Anthropic in overall consumer usage, according to new data from Sensor Tower.)
Beyond subscriptions, the vast majority of money companies spend on are API calls to the model, which cover the use of tokens for activities like coding. Anthropic’s Claude Code has a strong reputation as a powerful AI coding tool.
Ramp can’t always tell from spend data which models most businesses are using. When he can see the details of the model – in about a third of the transactions – businesses spend mainly on various flavors of the Claude Opus, particularly the later editions. Opus is the predecessor to Mythos and is still openly available.
In fact, at the end of May, Anthropic released a new version, Opus 4.8.
Mythos hadn’t been on the market that long, having been released to limited users since April. And Fable 5 closed after a few days.
While we can’t predict how this latest drama with the White House will affect Anthropic’s ability to go public as it had hoped (public market investors tend to be wary of companies embroiled in government disputes), the numbers show that Anthropic’s available models are more popular with businesses than ever.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
