Sales data hints Anthropic may benefit from Trump admin feud

Anthropic is riding an extraordinary wave of momentum. The AI lab capped off May by overtaking OpenAI in business spending market share for the first time, according to data from Ramp. It then raised $65 billion at a staggering $965 billion valuation, also surpassing OpenAI, and capped the month by filing confidential IPO paperwork, reportedly buoyed by its first-ever profitable quarter.

Then came Friday. The Trump administration escalated its conflict with the model maker, sending a letter demanding that Anthropic bar non-Americans, including its own employees, from accessing its cutting-edge models: the limited-release Mythos 5 and the more guarded public version, Fable 5, which had launched just three days earlier. The directive effectively forced Anthropic to pull its latest powerhouse model from the market entirely.

The White House invoked an obscure export control rule when ordering the ban, but the exact rationale remains murky. Speculation centers on reports that hackers easily bypassed Fable 5’s guardrails, which were designed to prevent access to Mythos’ capabilities. That model is so adept at uncovering security flaws in software code that Anthropic itself warned of its dangers and restricted its public release.

This latest clash follows Anthropic’s earlier refusal to let the government use its models for mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons. In March, the Trump administration responded by labeling the company a supply-chain risk. Yet that designation did not slow Anthropic’s business sales. In fact, Ramp’s data suggests the opposite. According to Ramp’s lead economist, Ara Kharazian, who compiled the business-spending AI data, this ongoing feud with the White House may actually help Anthropic.

“If anything, it’ll probably boost them,” Kharazian told TechCrunch. “Anthropic’s best month on record, as far as business adoption, was the month that the Department of Defense labeled them a supply-chain risk. There’s a lot of aura that comes with your model specifically being named too dangerous to use.”

Ramp’s data is not granular enough to reveal exactly how much revenue Anthropic will lose by pulling Mythos and Fable 5 from the market. Still, the dataset drawn from more than 70,000 businesses using Ramp’s platform shows that customers are heavily using Anthropic’s Opus models and that business adoption continues to climb.

For example, Ramp reported that Anthropic’s share of AI subscriptions paid for by businesses rose 2.5 percentage points in May to 41%. In comparison, OpenAI held 39.5% of AI subscriptions among Ramp’s customers, essentially flat from the prior month. (OpenAI still dominates overall consumer usage, according to new Sensor Tower data.)

Beyond subscriptions, the bulk of corporate spending goes toward API calls, which cover token usage for tasks like coding. Anthropic’s Claude Code has built a strong reputation as a powerful AI coding tool.

Ramp cannot always identify which specific models businesses are using from the spending data. When it can see the model details in about one-third of transactions, most spending is on various versions of Claude Opus, especially the later iterations. Opus is the model that preceded Mythos and remains openly available. In late May, Anthropic released a new version, Opus 4.8.

Mythos had only been available to limited users since April, and Fable 5 was shut down after just a few days. While it is impossible to predict how this latest White House drama will affect Anthropic’s IPO ambitions, public-market investors typically shy away from companies embroiled in government controversies. Still, the numbers suggest that Anthropic’s available models are more popular with businesses than ever before.