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Ranked: AI Models U.S. Businesses Pay For
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Key Takeaways
- OpenAI leads paid AI adoption among U.S. businesses at 35%, but Anthropic has surged to 30% in just over a year.
- Anthropic’s growth has been driven by enterprise tools like Claude Code and Cowork.
- Google, xAI, and others remain far behind, each used by less than 5% of businesses.
Anthropic is rapidly closing the gap with OpenAI in the race for paid AI adoption among U.S. businesses.
As of March 2026, 35% of companies pay for OpenAI’s models, compared to 30% for Anthropic—a sharp shift from early 2025, when the gap was nearly three times wider. The change highlights how quickly enterprise demand is consolidating around a small number of AI providers.
This chart, a part of Visual Capitalist’s AI Week sponsored by Terzo, uses anonymized spend data from over 50,000 U.S. businesses on the Ramp platform, capturing only paid subscriptions and excluding free-tier usage.
OpenAI Leads, But Anthropic Is Closing In Fast
OpenAI remains the most widely paid-for AI provider among U.S. businesses, reaching 35.2% of companies in March 2026. Anthropic sits just behind at 30.6%—a gap of only 4.5 percentage points.
The data table below shows the share of U.S. businesses paying for AI models from different providers from January 2023 to March of 2026:
| Share of U.S. Businesses Paying for an AI Subscription | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Date | OpenAI | Anthropic | xAI | |
| 1/1/2023 | 0.4% | 0.0% | 1.7% | 0.0% |
| 2/1/2023 | 1.5% | 0.0% | 1.6% | 0.0% |
| 3/1/2023 | 3.6% | 0.0% | 1.7% | 0.0% |
| 4/1/2023 | 5.7% | 0.0% | 1.8% | 0.0% |
| 5/1/2023 | 6.1% | 0.0% | 1.8% | 0.0% |
| 6/1/2023 | 5.9% | 0.0% | 1.9% | 0.0% |
| 7/1/2023 | 6.8% | 0.1% | 1.7% | 0.0% |
| 8/1/2023 | 7.2% | 0.1% | 1.7% | 0.0% |
| 9/1/2023 | 7.8% | 0.2% | 1.8% | 0.0% |
| 10/1/2023 | 8.1% | 0.3% | 1.8% | 0.0% |
| 11/1/2023 | 8.2% | 0.2% | 2.4% | 0.0% |
| 12/1/2023 | 9.3% | 0.3% | 2.4% | 0.0% |
| 1/1/2024 | 10.2% | 0.4% | 2.5% | 0.0% |
| 2/1/2024 | 10.2% | 0.4% | 2.6% | 0.0% |
| 3/1/2024 | 11.0% | 1.2% | 3.0% | 0.0% |
| 4/1/2024 | 10.6% | 1.4% | 3.3% | 0.0% |
| 5/1/2024 | 11.3% | 1.4% | 3.4% | 0.0% |
| 6/1/2024 | 11.0% | 1.5% | 3.2% | 0.0% |
| 7/1/2024 | 11.8% | 2.3% | 3.4% | 0.0% |
| 8/1/2024 | 12.5% | 2.5% | 3.5% | 0.0% |
| 9/1/2024 | 12.7% | 2.7% | 3.6% | 0.0% |
| 10/1/2024 | 13.7% | 3.0% | 3.7% | 0.0% |
| 11/1/2024 | 13.4% | 3.2% | 3.9% | 0.0% |
| 12/1/2024 | 14.8% | 3.6% | 4.0% | 0.0% |
| 1/1/2025 | 16.8% | 4.1% | 4.2% | 0.0% |
| 2/1/2025 | 18.2% | 4.4% | 4.2% | 0.2% |
| 3/1/2025 | 26.4% | 7.0% | 2.5% | 0.4% |
| 4/1/2025 | 32.0% | 7.9% | 3.2% | 0.5% |
| 5/1/2025 | 33.6% | 8.9% | 4.3% | 0.5% |
| 6/1/2025 | 33.4% | 9.6% | 4.0% | 0.6% |
| 7/1/2025 | 35.0% | 11.1% | 3.4% | 1.5% |
| 8/1/2025 | 36.5% | 12.1% | 3.0% | 1.5% |
| 9/1/2025 | 35.5% | 12.2% | 3.3% | 1.3% |
| 10/1/2025 | 35.8% | 14.3% | 3.3% | 1.6% |
| 11/1/2025 | 34.8% | 15.1% | 4.0% | 1.8% |
| 12/1/2025 | 36.8% | 16.7% | 4.3% | 1.9% |
| 1/1/2026 | 35.9% | 19.5% | 4.5% | 2.0% |
| 2/1/2026 | 34.4% | 24.4% | 4.7% | 1.9% |
| 3/1/2026 | 35.2% | 30.6% | 4.3% | 1.9% |
That gap looked very different a year ago. In January 2025, OpenAI was used by 16.8% of U.S. businesses while Anthropic sat at 4.1%, a spread of nearly 13 points. Anthropic has since grown more than sevenfold in 14 months, while OpenAI roughly doubled over the same period.
The remaining providers remain distant in paid business adoption. Google’s AI products—spanning Gemini, Vertex AI, and Workspace add-ons—have hovered between 3% and 4.5% of U.S. businesses for most of the past three years, barely moving despite heavy investment.
xAI has climbed from effectively zero in early 2024 to 1.9% in March 2026, a meaningful but still small footprint.
Claude Code and Cowork Drove the Anthropic Surge
Anthropic’s rapid rise in business adoption tracks its push into enterprise developer and knowledge-work tools.
Claude Code, the company’s coding assistant, and Cowork, its workflow collaboration platform, were both scaled aggressively across late 2025 and 2026—the period that coincides with the steepest part of Anthropic’s curve.
The pattern suggests that enterprise-native tooling, rather than general chatbot access, is now the key driver of paid seat growth. OpenAI has responded with its own developer coding tool, Codex, but Anthropic’s focus on developer workflows has clearly found traction in corporate procurement.
While Codex launched months after Claude Code, it has rapidly gained adoption among developers and knowledge workers, reaching four million active users as of April 21, 2026.