Anthropic is reportedly catching up to rival OpenAI as more businesses adopt its tools.
Close to a third of American businesses paid for the company’s artificial intelligence offerings last month, the Financial Times (FT) reported Saturday (April 11), citing data from payments company Ramp.
That number marks an increase of more than 6 percentage points from the prior month. Meanwhile, OpenAI remains in the lead but business adoption of its tools was flat at 35%, the Ramp data showed. The company’s findings were based on $100 billion in annual card and invoice spending from 50,000 customers, the FT added.
OpenAI has enjoyed a strong lead in the consumer space since it introduced ChatGPT in November 2022, the report added. The company has said it has around 900 million weekly active users, with a little more than 5% paying for its services.
The FT argued that this early growth is proving tough to maintain. The report, citing data from market researchers Sensor Tower, added that downloads of ChatGPT rose 5% in the month leading to March, while downloads of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot tripled to 21 million during the same time frame.
Also in March, ChatGPT’s weekly active users in the U.S. declined from month to month for the first time in around two years, the FT said, using data from Apptopia.
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OpenAI told the FT it did not recognize the data it had cited, adding that its AI coding agent Codex now has 3 million weekly users, up from 2 million last month.
“Our APIs now process more than 15 billion tokens per minute. ChatGPT has six times the monthly web visits and mobile sessions of the next largest AI app,” the company said. “Our ads pilot reached $100 million run rate in six weeks. That’s growth.”
Writing about AI adoption last week, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster argued that tools like Claude are able to gain ground as consumers are introduced to new AI models through work.
“ChatGPT expands outward from the consumer, earning trust in low-stakes, high-frequency tasks and carrying that trust into the workplace. The habit comes first; the enterprise follows,” Webster wrote.
“Claude follows the opposite path. It is encountered in the context of work, where precision matters and the cost of getting it wrong is higher. Contract analysis, code review and complex research are not entry points for casual use. They are reasons to adopt something new. In this case, the enterprise is not the endpoint but the starting point.”
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