AI business adoption re-accelerates, led by Anthropic

Ramp AI Index shows AI adoption rose 0.9 percentage points to 44.8% of businesses in October, led by breakout growth in Anthropic business adoption. Anthropic grew adoption 2.1 percentage points to 14.3%, its second-largest monthly increase on record after jumping 3.6 points to hit 7% of businesses in March 2025.

Compare that to OpenAI, which remains the leader in paid AI adoption by businesses but is seeing growth moderate. OpenAI grew adoption by 0.3 percentage points, landing at 35.8%, below its August 2025 high.

And Anthropic’s kind of been on a streak. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal wrote that Anthropic was on track to turn a profit faster than OpenAI, mostly on the back of a strategy “selling its Claude chatbot to businesses.”

What the Wall Street Journal got wrong (or more likely, what they simplified for a general audience) is that the vast majority of business spend on AI model companies isn’t on chatbots, as-in the chat interfaces most consumers think of. It’s on API spend: model usage by engineers and product teams building AI directly into product and business systems or using AI for coding and data labeling tasks.

At a business level, API spend by businesses is larger than the typical enterprise chatbot contract. It’s also probably getting stickier over time, as engineers tell me, because business users are starting to figure out which models are best for which tasks.

APIs are also a more reliable revenue generator than consumer AI usage, especially as consumers have an increasing number of free AI options at their disposal (see, Google’s free integration of Gemini across its product ecosystem).

API spend by businesses is larger than the typical enterprise chatbot contract. It’s also probably getting stickier over time.

So I would be pretty happy to be Anthropic right now. It’s an underrated business if you’re just looking at consumer adoption of AI tools, and business use is their most important revenue generator. In Ramp data, its customer base indexes to the tech sector, but that’s changing as its adoption rate grows and moves across sectors.

Otherwise: Tech (74%) and finance (60%) continue to lead in AI adoption. Retail businesses grew adoption fastest last month, rising two percentage points to 36%.

Impact of the government shutdown

The U.S. government estimate hasn’t reported new data since September due to the 44-day government shutdown. The Census Bureau, which produces the estimate using the Business Trends and Outlook Survey, hasn’t announced a date for the next release. We may not get a new read until December, depending on how long it takes for the survey to receive responses in the field.