Anthropic has taken the lead in the artificial intelligence race this year with its cutting-edge models and coding service that has been praised by American businesses. To date, OpenAI, however, has closed the gap with its competitor in the enterprise segment.
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Last spring, the demand for Anthropic Claude Code was so high that the service often experienced glitches and overloaded computing power. Meanwhile, business expenses on AI increased – employees began experimenting with new solutions; Companies have realized that most tasks do not always require the most powerful and expensive models. Companies that now use several models are increasingly turning to inexpensive Chinese-developed systems with open scales. Some Anthropic Claude users began to express dissatisfaction with the strict restrictions that the company introduced for the powerful Fable 5, released in June.
The price war was spurred by OpenAI, introducing a line of GPT-5.6 models in the Sol, Terra and Luna variants – customers were given a choice of solutions with different capabilities, and more economical options appeared. The Codex code writing service and other business solutions are actively promoting, the company is releasing new versions of junior models.
In September, spending by the roughly 120,000 companies that use Anthropic and OpenAI tools was split almost equally between the two AI giants, OpenRouter calculated. At the same time, at the beginning of the year, Anthropic accounted for three quarters of total costs. The given data, noted in OpenRouter, reflects the costs mainly of startups that are initially focused on AI, as well as more mature technology companies and large corporations.
OpenAI’s products, according to its own statement, are used by more than 2.5 million companies – the ChatGPT developer is closing the gap in the fight for corporate clients at a time when the two largest players are preparing to go public. Anthropic plans to go public as early as November, while OpenAI will likely wait until next year. Both companies are increasing capital expenditures; They will have to work hard in the coming months to demonstrate to Wall Street the viability of their business and justify a market valuation above $1 trillion.
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AI-based sales platform Reevo has decided to switch from Anthropic models to OpenAI, said the startup’s co-founder and CEO David Zhu. The decision was influenced by two reasons: cost and the desire to reduce dependence on one developer. This week, Anthropic held the Claude Founder House event in San Francisco – it turned out to be extremely popular, and not everyone was able to attend. Standing in line, gaming startup ReadyM co-founder Michael Szklarski said his company often requires cutting-edge models, and he favors Anthropic Fable 5.1, but hopes to meet with the AI lab engineers to discuss how they can reduce costs.
Economist at financial startup Ramp Ara Kharazian analyzed data from 70,000 of his company’s clients in mid-September and found that for the first time since December, businesses began spending more on OpenAI models than on Anthropic products – however, this reshuffle was short-lived, and a week later the latter regained its leadership by a small margin. The Ramp data sample, the startup clarified, is biased towards fast-growing technology companies of various sizes, including enterprises from the Fortune 500 list; and the expenses of individual developers were not included in the statistics.
Many business owners and industry analysts have cited the release of the OpenAI GPT-5.6 family of cost-effective models as a turning point; and soon after this, the company reduced the cost of operating GPT-5.6 Luna by 80%, and operating GPT-5.6 Terra fell in price by 20%. Software development platform Retool was hesitant at the beginning of the year between the OpenAI and Anthropic models, said company founder and CEO David Hsu. “The main catalyst” GPT-5.6 models were released, and Retool now predominantly uses OpenAI models – which, he estimates, are now about 20% cheaper than Anthropic systems.
Another reason is Anthropic’s policy of storing data used by Fable 5 for 30 days to ensure security and reliability, which is a problem for companies that handle sensitive information, including Retool itself. Anthropic subsequently tried to resolve this issue with some clients and gave them control over data storage. Retool, as a general rule, stipulates in contracts with its clients the deletion of all data, but when working with Fable it would not be possible to guarantee this. OpenAI is making progress, but Anthropic is not sitting idle – at the end of September the company began releasing models of the new Claude 5.5 family, the stated advantages of which include reduced costs and higher efficiency.
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