If the question is which AI makes better images, the general answer would be Google’s Nano Banana 2. And if we talk about preparing reports rigorously, we would probably say that Claude is the one who takes the lead. But in the AI race, just as important as being the best is appearing to be the best. And above all, make money with your model.
And if the arrival of artificial intelligence to the labor market has felt like an earthquake in the shape of more or less related layoffs, barriers to entry to junior profiles and have to work more Against all odds, the reality is that in recent months the scenario of which AI is the favorite of companies has taken a turn.
Visual Capitalist has published a graph that monitors month by month from January 2023 to March 2026 what percentage of US companies pay for each provider’s models. To prepare it, they used anonymized spending data from more than 50,000 companies on the platform. ramptaking only paid subscriptions, so free use is left out. The result is a clear picture of consolidation: the market is shrinking towards very few players at breakneck speed.
The graph marks a clear winner from the start: OpenAI is the most widespread payment AI provider among US companies, reaching a share of 35.2% in March of this year. Just behind is Anthropic with a share of 30.6%. You have to look down a lot to find the others: Google, xAI and the rest of the providers are below 5%. But the most important thing when looking at the photo is not who the leader is but the trend: Anthropic’s is a meteoric rise.
What AI model are companies paying for?
The market closes and It only has room for two: OpenAI and Anthropic together account for nearly 66% of the AI business payment market in the United States, meaning that two out of every three dollars that companies spend on AI models go to these two companies. The rest share the crumbs. This type of concentration is the fish that bites its tail: leading companies have more customers, more usage data and more resources to improve their products, so their pursuers have it increasingly difficult, although it is true that Google has muscle for a while.
What AI models are companies paying for? Visual Capitalist with Ramp data
January 2025 is a key date in the graph: OpenAI was present in 16.8% of companies and Anthropic barely had 4.1%, slightly below Google’s 4.2% share. In 14 months Anthropic has multiplied its presence sevenfold, while OpenAI has doubled it and Google has 4.3%. The takeoff coincides with the launch of Claude Code in February 2025, its scheduling assistant that became general availability in May of that year, and accelerates with the arrival of Cowork in January 2026, its workflow platform.
That Claude be a rocket The graph has several explanations. Yes, it’s a good AI model, but Anthropic has been able to build concrete tools around that model that companies use every day and that make it difficult to switch vendors. According to Sacra estimatesas of October 2025, Anthropic had more than 300,000 business clients that represented approximately 80% of its revenue, which shows that those at Amodei were clear about their strategy from the beginning: their niche is the company and not so much the ordinary user.
Google has been oscillating between 3 and 4.5% in business share for three years, a marginal advance compared to the budding duopoly and the investment made. Elon Musk’s xAI has gone from zero to 1.9% in March 2026, which means appearing on the map, but still very far from the competition. But the case of Google is the one that truly baffles: It has cutting-edge technology, one of the most powerful cloud infrastructures in the world and access to an amount of data like never before, but it doesn’t get companies to open their wallets. Everything indicates that the problem is in how it has packaged its products: dispersed among too many brands and platforms, which creates real confusion for the business customer.
In Xataka | If the question is which of the big tech companies is winning the AI race, the answer is: none
Cover | Visual Capitalist
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