Ramp's July AI index: Anthropic's market share hit 43.5%, widening its lead over OpenAI; Fable 5 is only 6% of tokens businesses bought, likely due to high cost
RampAra Kharazian
Context & Ripple Effects
Ramp’s earlier data showed Anthropic taking about 73% of spending from first-time AI-tool buyers after a near-even January split with OpenAI, while March data recorded rising business payment adoption for Anthropic as OpenAI’s stayed nearly flat. The July index extends that enterprise-buying arc from customer acquisition into market share and token purchasing.
First-order effects
Anthropic’s 43.5% share widens its reported lead over OpenAI in Ramp’s July measure, strengthening its position with business buyers tracked by Ramp.
Fable 5 represented only 6% of business token purchases in the index; Ramp attributes the limited uptake to its high cost.
Second-order effects
OpenAI faces added pressure to improve its enterprise conversion as Anthropic’s earlier gains among new buyers are now reflected in the July share reading.
The gap between Fable 5’s token share and its reported cost makes price a more explicit procurement constraint for vendors selling high-volume model usage to businesses.
Third-order effects
If successive Ramp readings continue in this direction, enterprise AI procurement will increasingly reward providers that pair buyer adoption with token economics, rather than treating model availability as sufficient.
The pattern points to a more concentrated business AI market in which marginal usage is allocated through cost-sensitive purchasing decisions.
The trend: Enterprise AI competition is shifting from early subscription adoption toward cost-sensitive allocation of ongoing token spend.
If a world class genius mathematician, chemist, historian, etc showed up at most people's door they wouldn't really have a task for them to do that requires all that genius. If an eager and knowledgeable intern who is pretty decent a coding shows up, there's a lot of useful work
I just spent 20 minutes talking to Google (not even a high level gemini, just the free search result chatbot whatever that is) about the layout of my home ethernet and which switch I should buy. It was helpful. I didn't need a genius, it was plenty smart enough and
A lot of replies from employees who say they aren't allowed to use Fable bc Anthropic is required to retain prompts for 30 days for U.S. government safety checks
We added OpenAI spend to our model market share chart. OpenAI is doing well. Lots of growth coming from the latest generation of models, especially GPT 5.6 Sol [image]
Some more evidence of diminishing marginal returns to intelligence. That said, it takes time and complementary innovation use new capabilities effectively. True of any general purpose technology. https://empiricrafting.substack.com/ ...
The reason for that is 90% of the tasks do not require an einstein level model. Even for highly complex tasks, planning should be done by the best model, and execution by the cheaper one. Most people care about outcomes. If you're getting similar results at lower cost, why would
Cost per intelligence has never been more important, and it's exciting to see enterprises reach for grok 4.6 as a frontier model at a fraction of the cost
NEW from Ramp AI Index: disappointing adoption of Fable 5 We've heard several reasons from businesses...mainly Fable 5 is just too expensive. A model so powerful it was briefly banned, and yet businesses don't think it's worth the price. [image]
We'll see much faster commoditisation of LLMs from here. What does this mean? It simply means go long hyperscalers. Fable 5 adoption failed simply because it was too expensive. This means customers' willingness to pay premium for incremental performance is shrinking. Models [imag…
I think Fable's awesome but I'd suspect part of the reason for this is that there are a lot more cost effective models that can do most(or all) of what you need - including open source models! Grok's new 4.6 model is a great example, really strong and relatively cheap model
Powerful enough to be banned, still only 11% of business spend. The reason given is price. In agent workloads, much of that cost comes from input tokens, often context the model never needed to see. We compress that context before inference. Same model, smaller bill.
If this analysis from @SemiAnalysis_ (ht @brotsquared) is correct, does Fable need to be commercially popular for it to be an economic success story? Is it possible that Anthropic wins at Opus-tier levels because of breakthroughs made at the Fable-tier? [image]
might be bad chart/not account for consumer use but isn't this bad for R&D? given fable isn't recovering it's cost in API spend. also possible distilling into opis 5 justifies cost too but all around very odd
IMO this is 100% about the 30-day data retention policy that came with Fable. Businesses are saying no effing way and sticking with the models where that policy doesn't apply.
To register a little prediction, I think better and better models will be cost-efficient to fewer and fewer customers. Most people use AI to do stuff for which it really is already approaching a kind of “AGI for dummies.” So high end models will have to justify their cost by