Why Anthropic’s Fight With Trump Is Actually Boosting Business Sales
Anthropic is having quite a month, and the drama may be working in its favor. Despite an escalating conflict with the Trump administration that forced the AI lab to pull its most powerful models from the market, Anthropic business sales growth has only accelerated, according to new spending data from financial platform Ramp.
The numbers are striking. Anthropic’s share of AI subscriptions paid for by businesses climbed 2.5 percentage points in May to reach 41%, overtaking OpenAI, which held 39.5%, essentially flat from the prior month. This marks the first time Anthropic has beaten OpenAI in business market share, a milestone that lands in the middle of one of the company’s most turbulent stretches yet.
The latest flashpoint came when the Trump administration sent a letter demanding that Anthropic ban non-Americans, including its own employees, from accessing its newest models: the limited-release Mythos 5 and Fable 5, a version of Mythos released to the public just days earlier. The move, invoking an obscure export control directive, effectively forced Anthropic to pull both models entirely. The chatter surrounding the ban centered on reports that hackers had found ways around Fable 5’s guardrails, allowing access to Mythos’ full capabilities, a model Anthropic itself had marketed as dangerous due to its ability to identify security vulnerabilities in software code.
This is not the first time the two sides have clashed. Earlier this year, Anthropic refused to let the government use its models for mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, after which the Trump administration designated the company a supply-chain risk in March. Rather than scare off enterprise customers, that episode appeared to do the opposite.
Ramp’s lead economist, Ara Kharazian, who compiled the business spending data from over 70,000 companies on the platform, told TechCrunch that the pattern is becoming a trend. “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,” Kharazian said. “There’s a lot of aura that comes with your model specifically being named too dangerous to use.”
His take on the latest standoff? “If anything, it’ll probably boost them.”
The underlying Anthropic business sales growth story is strong even beyond the politics. The company closed May by raising $65 billion at a near-trillion-dollar valuation, filed confidential IPO paperwork, and reported what it described as its first-ever profitable quarter. It also released Opus 4.8 in late May, and the Ramp data shows businesses are still spending heavily on the Claude Opus model family, particularly through API calls for coding tasks. Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding tool, has earned a strong reputation in developer circles.
Mythos and Fable 5 were not on the market long enough to register significantly in the spending data. What the numbers do confirm is that Anthropic’s available models are more in demand among businesses than at any point in the company’s history, government pressure or not.
