Anthropic is having an extraordinary run. The AI lab ended May by surpassing OpenAI in business spending market share for the first time, according to data from Ramp. It raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation—also beating OpenAI—at the end of May, then moved into June by filing confidential paperwork for an IPO, reportedly driven by its first-ever profitable quarter. Then, on Friday, the Trump administration escalated its conflict with the model maker by sending a letter demanding it ban non-Americans—including Anthropic’s own employees—from accessing its cutting-edge models: the limited-release Mythos 5 and the more guarded public version, Fable 5, released three days earlier. This effectively forced Anthropic to pull its latest powerful model from the market entirely. Although the White House invoked an obscure export control directive when ordering the ban, the exact reason remains unclear. Rumors suggest that hackers easily bypassed Fable 5’s guardrails, which were designed to prevent access to Mythos’ capabilities. That model is so adept at identifying security flaws in software code that Anthropic itself marketed it as dangerous and restricted its public release.

This latest controversy follows Anthropic’s well-known refusal to allow the government to use its models for mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons. As a result, in March, the Trump administration declared the company a supply chain risk. That didn’t hurt Anthropic’s business sales—quite the opposite, according to Ramp’s data. Ironically, this new feud with the Trump administration, which also seems to validate the hype around Mythos’ legendary power, may benefit rather than harm Anthropic, according to Ramp’s lead economist Ara Kharazian, who compiled the business spending AI data. “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 isn’t detailed enough to show how much financial impact the company will face from pulling Mythos and Fable 5 off the market. Still, the data—drawn from more than 70,000 businesses using its platform—reveals that customers heavily use Anthropic’s Opus models and that business usage has been growing. For instance, Ramp reported that Anthropic’s share of AI subscriptions paid for by businesses rose 2.5 percentage points in May to 41%. That compares to OpenAI, which commanded 39.5% of AI subscriptions by its customers, essentially flat from the prior month. (OpenAI still greatly leads Anthropic in overall consumer usage, according to new data from Sensor Tower.) Beyond subscriptions, the vast majority of what companies spend on is API calls to the model, covering token use for activities like coding. Anthropic’s Claude Code has a strong reputation as a powerful AI coding tool.

Ramp can’t always see from the spending data which models most businesses are using. When it can see the model details—in about one-third of transactions—businesses are mostly spending on various versions of Claude Opus, particularly the later ones. Opus is the model that preceded Mythos and remains openly available. In fact, in late May, Anthropic released a new version, Opus 4.8. Mythos had not been on the market for long, having been released to limited users as of April. And Fable 5 was shut down after just a few days. While we can’t predict how this latest drama with the White House will affect Anthropic’s ability to go public as hoped—public-market investors tend to be wary of companies embroiled in government controversies—the numbers indicate that Anthropic’s available models are more popular with businesses than ever before.