Anthropic subscriptions overtake OpenAI in the UK, fresh data suggests
Spending on Anthropic subscriptions has overtaken OpenAI in the UK for the first time, fresh data suggests, as the firm’s focus on enterprise customers helped boost its revenues.
Anthropic accounted for as much as 54 per cent of all UK business spending on AI firms in the three months to July, compared to just 27 per cent for OpenAI, according to analysis shared exclusively with CityAM.
In the first quarter of the year, OpenAI accounted for 42 per cent of businesses’ AI spend, compared to 34 per cent for Anthropic.
The data analysed spending trends from hundreds of thousands of business customers of Capital on Tap, a London-based corporate credit card company that processes tens of billions of pounds of transactions annually.
It underscores OpenAI’s waning stranglehold on the AI market as competitors muscle in with attractive business packages and powerful rival frontier models. OpenAI accounted for as much as 70 per cent of all spend on AI companies as recently as the second quarter of last year, the data found, compared with just 8 per cent for Anthropic.
The data also identified a surge in AI adoption across UK businesses. More than one in eight companies spent money on AI firms’ services in the second quarter of the year, compared to just one in twenty at the beginning of last year.
“It’s accelerating – if you look at the steepness of the curve it keeps going up. I can see [adoption] going up 3x from where it is today. Every indicator is up and to the right,” said Capital on Tap chief executive Damian Brycy.
“The interesting question is if they raise prices – if they have to – what will happen to adoption. If a £25 subscription price is raised to £100, does it change adoption – will companies think, how useful is this to our business?”
The average quarterly AI spend of Capital on Tap’s customer base, which is largely made up of small and medium-sized businesses, stood at £288. Though this figure has been pushed up substantially by heavy adoption among the top percentile of customers, whose quarterly AI spend stood at over £3,000.
The adoption of ‘vibe coding’ among businesses has also increased substantially, rising from five per cent of AI spend at the beginning of last year to 16 per cent a year later.
The data excludes spending on AI services offered by software companies, such as Google and Microsoft, because of an inability to distinguish spending on non-AI services.