Anthropic’s latest feud with the Trump admin may actually help it, sales data suggests

Anthropic has a month.

The AI ​​Lab ended May by surpassing OpenAI in enterprise spend market share for the first time, trailing only Disaster revealed. It raised $65 billion in late May at a $965 billion valuation (also better than OpenAI), then headed into June by filing confidential paperwork for an initial public offering, reportedly on the back of its first-ever profitable quarter.

Then on Friday, the Trump administration renewed its war against the model maker, sending a letter demanding that it ban non-Americans, including Anthropic employees, from accessing the state-of-the-art models: the limited-edition 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.

Although the White House invoked an obscure export control directive in issuing the ban, the exact cause remains unclear. It was rumored that hackers could easily bypass Fable 5’s guardrails, which were intended to prevent access to Mythos’ capabilities. That model is so good at detecting 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, the Trump administration declared the company a supply chain risk in March.

That hasn’t deterred Anthropic’s sales to companies. On the contrary, as Ramp’s data shows. Ironically, this latest feud with the Trump administration, which also seems to confirm the buzz about Mythos’ mythological power, could help rather than hurt Anthropic, according to Ramp’s chief economist, Ara Kharazian. Kharazian is the person who collected the AI ​​data on company spending.

“It will probably give them a boost,” Kharazian told TechCrunch. “Anthropic’s best month ever in terms of corporate adoption was the month the Department of Defense labeled them a supply chain risk. There’s a lot of aura associated with your model specifically being called too dangerous to use.”

Ramp’s data is not detailed enough to see how much financial damage the company will suffer by taking Mythos and Fable 5 off the market.

Still, data from more than 70,000 companies using the platform shows that customers are using Anthropic’s Opus models heavily and that business usage has increased.

For example, Ramp reported that Anthropic’s share of enterprise-paid AI subscriptions rose 2.5 percentage points to 41% in May. This compares to OpenAI, which held 39.5% of its customers’ AI subscriptions, essentially flat from the previous month. (OpenAI is still a major leader in overall consumer usage, according to Anthropic new data from Sensor Tower.)

Besides subscriptions, the vast majority of what companies spend money on is model API calls, which involve using tokens for activities like coding. Claude Code from Anthropic has a strong reputation as a powerful AI coding tool.

Ramp cannot always see from the spending data which models most companies use. When it can see the model details – in about a third of transactions – companies spend money mainly on different flavors of Claude Opus, especially the later versions. Opus is the model that preceded Mythos and is still openly available.

At the end of May, Anthropic even released a new version, Opus 4.8.

Mythos had not been on the market for long and had been released to a limited number of users since April. And Fable 5 was canceled after a few days.

While we can’t predict how this latest drama with the White House will impact Anthropic’s ability to go public as it hoped (public market investors are often wary of companies embroiled in government controversy), the numbers indicate that Anthropic’s available models are more popular with companies than ever before.