Anthropic’s latest feud with the Trump administration may actually boost business sales, data suggests

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Anthropic’s latest feud with the Trump administration may actually boost business sales, data suggests

Anthropic is having a month. The AI lab finished May by surpassing OpenAI in market share of business spending for the first time, according to data from Ramp, a corporate spending platform. It raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation—also besting OpenAI—at the end of May, then waltzed into June by filing confidential paperwork for an IPO, reportedly on the strength of its first-ever profitable quarter. Then on Friday, the Trump administration renewed its war on the model maker by sending a letter demanding it ban non-Americans, including Anthropic’s employees, from accessing its state-of-the-art models: the limited-release Mythos 5 and the more guarded version of Mythos released to the public three days earlier, called Fable 5. This essentially forced Anthropic to pull its latest all-powerful model from the market altogether.

Government scrutiny and market reaction

Although the White House invoked an obscure export control directive when ordering the ban, the exact cause remains unclear. The chatter was that hackers easily bypassed Fable 5’s guardrails, which were intended to prevent access to Mythos’ capabilities. That model is so good at finding security flaws in software code that Anthropic itself marketed it as dangerous and restricted its public release. This new drama comes after Anthropic famously refused to allow the government to use its models for mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons. As a result, in March, the Trump administration declared the company a supply chain risk.

That didn’t deter Anthropic’s sales to businesses. Quite the opposite, Ramp’s data shows. Ironically, this latest feud with the Trump administration, which also appears to validate the hubbub over Mythos’ mythological power, may help rather than hurt Anthropic, according to Ramp’s lead economist Ara Kharazian. Kharazian is the person who compiled the business spending AI data.

What the data shows

Ramp’s data isn’t granular enough for us to see how much of a financial hit the company will take by pulling Mythos and Fable 5 off the market. Still the data, from more than 70,000 businesses that use its platform, shows that customers heavily use Anthropic’s Opus models and that business use has been growing.

For instance, Ramp reported that Anthropic’s share of AI subscriptions paid for by businesses rose 2.5 percentage points in May to 41%. This compares to OpenAI, which commanded 39.5% of AI subscriptions by its customers, essentially flat from the prior month. (OpenAI still greatly leads Anthropic in overall consumer usage, according to new data from Sensor Tower).

Beyond subscriptions, the vast majority of what companies spend money on is API calls to the model, which cover token use for activities like coding. Anthropic’s Claude Code has a strong reputation as a powerful AI coding tool. Ramp can’t always see from the spending data which models most businesses are using. When it can see the model details—in about one-third of transactions—businesses are mostly spending on various flavors of Claude Opus, particularly the later versions. Opus is the model that preceded Mythos and is still openly available. In fact, in late May, Anthropic released a new version, Opus 4.8. Mythos had not been on the market for that long, having been released to limited users as of April. And Fable 5 was shut down after a few days.

Implications for Anthropic’s IPO

While we can’t predict how this latest drama with the White House will impact Anthropic’s ability to go public as it hoped to—public-market investors tend to be wary of companies embroiled in controversies with the government—the numbers indicate that Anthropic’s available models are more popular with businesses than ever before. The combination of technical prowess and regulatory friction appears to be creating a powerful market signal: that Anthropic’s models are too capable to ignore, even when they are too dangerous to widely deploy.

Conclusion

Anthropic’s repeated confrontations with the Trump administration, rather than harming its business, may be reinforcing its reputation as a cutting-edge AI developer. The government’s actions, intended to restrict access, are being interpreted by the market as validation of the models’ exceptional power. Whether this dynamic holds as the company moves toward a public offering remains to be seen, but for now, the data suggests that in the AI industry, government scrutiny can be a surprising asset.

FAQs

Q1: Why did the Trump administration target Anthropic?
The administration sent a letter demanding Anthropic ban non-Americans from accessing its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models, citing an obscure export control directive. The move followed Anthropic’s refusal to allow its models to be used for mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.

Q2: How did Anthropic’s business spending market share change?
According to Ramp data, Anthropic’s share of AI subscriptions paid for by businesses rose 2.5 percentage points in May to 41%, surpassing OpenAI’s 39.5% for the first time.

Q3: What models are businesses actually using?
Ramp’s data shows businesses are primarily spending on various versions of Claude Opus, particularly the later versions. Opus is the model that preceded the now-restricted Mythos and remains openly available.

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