Anthropic has been killing it in the business market, success that appears to be at least partially attributable to pushback against the Pentagon. The maker of the Claude family of models saw business software subscriptions grow 4.9 percent month over month in February, according to AI fintech biz Ramp, a period during which OpenAI's subscription share fell 1.5 percent. In January, Anthropic's subscription share grew 2.8 percentage points while OpenAI adoption slipped 0.9 percentage points, the company said. OpenAI still leads in overall business subscription market share, 34.4 percent to 24.4 percent, but Anthropic has been catching up fast. "Nearly one in four businesses on Ramp now pays for Anthropic (a year ago, it was one in 25)," said Ara Kharazian, an economist for Ramp, in a blog post. "OpenAI's 1.5 percent decline was the largest in any single month for any AI model company since we started tracking business AI adoption." According to Kharazian, businesses selecting AI services for the first time now choose Anthropic about 70 percent of the time. Coincidentally, OpenAI is reportedly revising its strategy to focus on selling AI to businesses and software developers, the very markets in which Anthropic appears to be prospering. It looks like the consumer market is amplifying business preferences. In late January, Reuters reported on a rift between Anthropic and the Defense Department over Anthropic's refusal to remove model guardrails to make its models more amenable to military applications. Having positioned itself as the responsible AI company, only to walk that back a little amid its government negotiations, Anthropic pushed back publicly at the end of February. That didn't endear Anthropic to the Trump administration. On March 4, the AI biz said it received notice that Washington designated it a supply chain risk to US national security, and filed lawsuits challenging its excommunication by the Defense Department. While Anthropic's public commitment to r...
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