Anthropic has grown rapidly in the corporate artificial intelligence (AI) market, appearing to catch up with OpenAI.
According to payment information startup Ramp on Apr. 11, as of March this year, the adoption rate of Anthropic's AI tools among U.S. corporations was 30.6%, up 6.3 percentage points (p) from the previous month. This followed a 4.9%p rise in February and marked the largest monthly increase.
OpenAI's adoption rate is still No. 1 at 35.2%, but while it has hovered around 35% for nine months since last July with growth stalled, Anthropic's adoption is rising rapidly. Ramp compiled the figures based on $100 billion in annual card and invoice expenditure from more than 50,000 customers.
The gap in corporate adoption rates between the two companies was as high as 10%p in February and nearly 20%p in December last year. As the coding tool "Claude Code," based on Anthropic's AI model Claude, gains traction, it appears to be narrowing the gap with OpenAI quickly. Ramp projected, "If the current growth pace continues, Anthropic will overtake OpenAI within the next two months."
By industry, Anthropic was found to have already outpaced OpenAI in three institutional sectors: information; finance and insurance; and professional services. By contrast, OpenAI still held the upper hand in education, manufacturing, and wholesale and retail.
Anthropic did not appear to suffer major business damage despite conflicts such as being designated a supply chain risk corporation by the Ministry of National Defense (Pentagon). The company recently surpassed $30 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR), about three times the $9 billion at the end of last year, totaling about 44.4 trillion won.
Ara Karajian, a senior researcher at Ramp, said Anthropic's rapid growth "reflects a strategy focused on targeting developers and professionals that is paying off."
OpenAI, however, told the Financial Times (FT) that it "does not acknowledge" Ramp's findings. According to OpenAI, weekly users of its AI coding tool Codex increased by 1 million in a month, from 2 million last month to 3 million recently. It also argued that large-scale contracts with big corporations were not reflected in the data.
OpenAI secured a leading position in the consumer AI market after launching ChatGPT in Nov. 2022. ChatGPT currently has about 900 million weekly active users, of whom about 5% are paid subscribers.
Growth, however, is slowing compared with before. According to market researcher Sensor Tower, ChatGPT downloads last month rose 5% from the previous month, while Claude's downloads tripled over the same period to 21 million.