Anthropic's Trump Feud: Why Sales Data Suggests It's a Win

Anthropic has experienced a truly remarkable period of accelerated growth and significant challenges this past month.

The innovative AI laboratory concluded May by achieving a significant milestone, for the first time surpassing OpenAI in the market share of business spending, as recently disclosed by Ramp. This period also saw Anthropic successfully raise $65 billion at an impressive $965 billion valuation, once again outperforming OpenAI. Building on this momentum, the company transitioned into June by confidentially filing paperwork for an Initial Public Offering (IPO), reportedly fueled by its inaugural profitable quarter.

However, the company’s trajectory encountered a significant hurdle on Friday when the Trump administration escalated its scrutiny. A formal letter was issued demanding Anthropic restrict access for non-Americans, including its own employees, to its most advanced models: the limited-release Mythos 5 and the publicly available, more guarded version of Mythos, Fable 5, which had been launched just three days prior.

This directive effectively compelled Anthropic to withdraw its latest, most powerful model from the market entirely.

While the White House cited an obscure export control directive for the ban, the precise underlying reasons remain ambiguous. Industry speculation suggests that hackers had reportedly circumvented Fable 5’s protective measures, thereby gaining access to Mythos’ advanced capabilities. Mythos is notably adept at identifying security vulnerabilities in software code, a prowess Anthropic itself acknowledged by marketing it as "dangerous" and restricting its public distribution.

This recent conflict follows Anthropic's earlier, well-publicized refusal to permit the government to deploy its models for mass surveillance of American citizens or for fully autonomous weapons systems. In response to this, the Trump administration had, in March, designated the company a supply chain risk.

Yet, this prior designation did not impede Anthropic's corporate sales; quite the contrary, Ramp's data indicates. Ironically, this latest dispute with the Trump administration, which also appears to corroborate the buzz surrounding Mythos' extraordinary capabilities, might ultimately benefit Anthropic rather than harm it, according to Ara Kharazian, Ramp's lead economist and the compiler of the business AI spending data.

"If anything, it'll probably boost them," Kharazian informed TechCrunch. "Anthropic's best month on record, as far as business adoption, was the month that the Department of Defense labeled them a supply chain risk. There's a lot of aura that comes with your model specifically being named too dangerous to use."

Ramp’s data, however, lacks the granularity to precisely quantify the financial impact on Anthropic from the withdrawal of Mythos and Fable 5 from the market.

Nevertheless, the comprehensive data, derived from over 70,000 businesses utilizing Ramp’s platform, clearly demonstrates a robust and growing adoption of Anthropic’s Opus models among its business clientele.

For example, Ramp reported that Anthropic's share of AI subscriptions paid for by businesses ascended by 2.5 percentage points in May, reaching 41%. This figure now surpasses OpenAI, which commanded 39.5% of AI subscriptions from its customers, remaining largely stable from the preceding month. (It is worth noting that OpenAI continues to significantly lead Anthropic in overall consumer usage, according to new data from Sensor Tower).

Beyond subscription services, a substantial portion of corporate expenditure is directed towards API calls to models, covering token usage for various activities such as coding. Anthropic’s Claude Code, in particular, has garnered a strong reputation as a highly effective AI coding tool.

While Ramp’s spending data does not always specify which models businesses are primarily using, in approximately one-third of transactions where model details are visible, companies are predominantly investing in various iterations of Claude Opus, especially its more recent versions. Opus is the predecessor to Mythos and remains widely accessible.

Notably, Anthropic released a new version, Opus 4.8, in late May.

Mythos itself had a relatively brief market presence, having been introduced to a limited user base in April. Fable 5, its public counterpart, was deactivated merely days after its launch.

While the ultimate impact of this latest administrative controversy on Anthropic’s prospective IPO remains uncertain—given that public-market investors often exhibit caution towards companies entangled in government disputes—the prevailing data unequivocally indicates that Anthropic’s currently available models are enjoying unprecedented popularity among businesses.