Anthropic’s U.S. enterprise customers are abandoning its flagship “Fable 5” in droves in favor of cheaper alternatives. The sudden change in priorities jeopardized the company’s usual strategy of building expensive flagship models and created tensions ahead of the largest initial public offering in history.
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Payments service Ramp Financial collected spending data from 70,000 companies, report says financial timesshowing that demand for Fable 5 has actually stopped growing. This goes against the trend of enterprise customers favoring the most powerful models, which are now increasingly finding that previous models are powerful enough for most of their workloads. Accel partner Miles Clements, who invested nearly $1 billion in Anthropic, noted “Most people don’t need to use cutting-edge technology”and the period when customers mainly opted for the most advanced models proved to be short-lived.
Image source: Ramp AI Index
This situation is also affected by the high cost of “Fable 5”, and companies are increasingly trying to control AI costs through more reasonable model selection. Alternatives are also emerging to cheaper open-frame models from China and other countries. However, since the launch of GPT 5.6 in July, OpenAI has also solidified its position: adjusted annual revenue grew 35% this quarter, exceeding $40 billion, and the cost of the model itself is significantly lower than that of “Fable 5”. Moreover, Anthropic’s own model Opus 5, released at a lower price at the end of July, has surpassed “Fable 5” in terms of corporate spending, according to Ramp data.
Image source: Ramp AI Index
The launch of “Fable 5” is also accompanied by political issues. In early June, Donald Trump’s administration ordered Anthropic to recall the model, citing national security concerns, and only restarted it on July 1 after receiving permission. Concerns about new restrictions have since eased, but analysts and investors say political uncertainty now plays a secondary role compared with prices and performance. Ramp chief economist Ara Kharazian also said that the data storage restrictions implemented by the Trump administration had a negative impact on the release of “Fable 5”.
Weak demand for “Fable 5” has added to uncertainty ahead of Anthropic’s proposed IPO, which could be valued by investors at $2 trillion or more, possibly as soon as next month. In July, the company’s annual revenue hit $65 billion, compared with $47 billion in May, but the figure was below the most optimistic expectations of investors, who expected revenue to top $80 billion.
Meanwhile, Anthropic continues to grow rapidly. As a result, its revenue has grown nearly sevenfold since the start of the year, with the company reporting its first adjusted operating profit in the second quarter and expecting to remain profitable in the third quarter.
Against this backdrop, waning demand for the most expensive models could change the overall economics of the artificial intelligence market, as the largest developers so far have spent a significant portion of their billions of dollars on training increasingly complex systems. Clements believes that technological breakthroughs are still needed to solve the most ambitious problems and attract leading researchers, but in the future such models will increasingly be used as a demonstration of capability rather than as a primary commercial tool.
Karazian warned that predicting humanity’s future trajectory even months in advance is nearly impossible. He said that previous trends pointed to the company being dominant, but that changed after the successful launch of GPT 5.6 and weak sales of Fable 5.
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