The race for corporate AI budgets is tilting again. Payment data from Ramp, the corporate card and expense platform, shows OpenAI outgrowing Anthropic among US businesses in Q3 to date, the first reversal since Anthropic seized the lead three months ago. Ramp’s lead economist, Ara Kharazian, shared the update on August 20.
The Ramp AI Index tracks transactions across more than 70,000 American companies. July’s snapshot still favors Anthropic, at 43.5% of businesses paying for subscriptions or tokens, against OpenAI’s 39.7%. The quarter-to-date trend is what changed, with Kharazian crediting GPT-5.6 Sol as increasingly the choice for developers.
Model-level data explains part of the swing. Anthropic’s top-tier Fable 5, priced near $10 per million tokens, captured only 6% of purchased Anthropic tokens and 11.4% of Anthropic model dollars in its first month. Kharazian blamed price and regulator-imposed data retention requirements for the slow start.
The overall pie keeps growing. Paid AI adoption among Ramp customers hit 55.7%, up from just over half in March. Median AI spend reached $11.95 per employee per month in July, with the top 1% of companies at a $7,400 median.
Open models are quietly gaining: 6.1% of AI-spending businesses used serving platforms that route to open-source and Chinese models in July, up from 4.5% in January. New buyers still pick American labs almost exclusively, Kharazian said, but heavy spenders increasingly add open alternatives.
