The Trump Controversy Paradox: How Anthropic’s AI Sales Are Soaring, According to Data

Key Takeaways:

• Ascendant AI Powerhouse: Anthropic has achieved significant milestones, including surpassing OpenAI in business spending market share, securing a massive $65 billion valuation, achieving its first profitable quarter, and confidentially filing for an IPO.
• Government Showdown: The Trump administration has escalated its scrutiny, demanding Anthropic ban non-Americans from its advanced Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models, leading to their swift withdrawal, reportedly due to concerns over security guardrail bypasses and the models’ potent capabilities.
• Controversy Fuels Growth: Paradoxically, past government friction (like being labeled a “supply chain risk” for refusing surveillance use) has previously boosted Anthropic’s business adoption, suggesting this latest ban might similarly enhance its mystique and market appeal for its widely available Claude Opus models.

Anthropic, the AI powerhouse, has been making headlines at a dizzying pace, showcasing a blend of unprecedented financial success and high-stakes regulatory drama. The company’s recent trajectory paints a picture of rapid growth, innovation, and an increasingly tense relationship with government oversight.

The Ascent of Anthropic: From Valuation to IPO Ambitions

May concluded with a flourish for Anthropic, revealing a new era of market dominance and ambitious financial milestones. For the first time, the AI lab outpaced OpenAI in the crucial metric of business spending market share, a revelation from financial tech platform Ramp. This market leadership was underscored by a colossal $65 billion fundraising round, catapulting its valuation to an eye-watering $965 billion – a figure that also reportedly eclipsed OpenAI’s latest valuation.

The momentum didn’t stop there. As June began, Anthropic reportedly submitted confidential paperwork for an Initial Public Offering (IPO), signaling its intent to go public. This move was reportedly bolstered by the company’s achievement of its first-ever profitable quarter, a rare feat for a high-growth AI startup in such a capital-intensive industry. The convergence of these factors positions Anthropic not just as a competitor, but as a leading force shaping the future of enterprise AI.

The Controversial Clash: A Government Ban on Cutting-Edge Models

Yet, amidst its financial triumphs, Anthropic found itself embroiled in a renewed conflict with the Trump administration. On Friday, the White House issued a stern letter, demanding the company implement an immediate ban on all non-American individuals, including Anthropic’s own international employees, from accessing its most advanced models: the limited-release Mythos 5 and the publicly available Fable 5. The latter had only been released to the public a mere three days prior.

This directive effectively forced Anthropic to pull its latest, most powerful models from the market altogether. While the administration cited an obscure export control directive, the precise rationale behind the ban remains shrouded in speculation. Industry chatter suggests that hackers had reportedly found easy ways to bypass Fable 5’s built-in guardrails, which were designed to restrict access to the core capabilities of Mythos. Mythos itself was marketed by Anthropic as a potentially “dangerous” tool due to its exceptional prowess in identifying security vulnerabilities within software code, leading to its initially restricted public release. The administration’s intervention highlights growing governmental concern over the dual-use nature and potential misuse of state-of-the-art AI.

A History of Friction and Unintended Consequences

This isn’t Anthropic’s first brush with governmental antagonism. The company previously made headlines for its principled refusal to allow the government to deploy its models for mass surveillance of American citizens or for the development of fully autonomous weapons systems. This stance led to the Trump administration in March declaring Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” a label typically reserved for entities deemed a threat to national security. One might expect such a designation to cripple a company’s prospects, especially in the sensitive tech sector.

However, the reality proved quite the opposite. Ramp’s data indicates that the “supply chain risk” declaration did not deter business sales; it arguably boosted them. Ara Kharazian, Ramp’s lead economist and the compiler of the business spending AI data, articulated this unexpected phenomenon. “If anything, it’ll probably boost them,” Kharazian told TechCrunch. “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.” This latest feud, which seemingly validates the “mythological power” associated with the Mythos model, could, ironically, serve a similar purpose, burnishing Anthropic’s image as a creator of cutting-edge, almost controversially powerful, AI.

The Data Speaks: Anthropic’s Sustained Business Momentum

While Ramp’s data isn’t granular enough to quantify the immediate financial impact of pulling Mythos and Fable 5 from the market, the broader trends from its platform—which tracks spending across over 70,000 businesses—paint a clear picture of robust and growing adoption for Anthropic’s available models.

Specifically, Anthropic’s share of AI subscriptions paid for by businesses surged by 2.5 percentage points in May, reaching an impressive 41%. This puts it ahead of OpenAI, which held 39.5% of AI subscriptions among its business customers, largely flat from the previous month. It’s important to note, however, that OpenAI still maintains a substantial lead in overall consumer usage, according to separate data from Sensor Tower.

Beyond subscriptions, a significant portion of corporate AI spending is dedicated to API calls to models, covering token usage for various activities like coding. Anthropic’s Claude Code has garnered a strong reputation as a highly effective AI coding tool, contributing significantly to its enterprise appeal. While Ramp’s data can’t always pinpoint the exact models used in every transaction, in approximately one-third of cases where model details are visible, businesses are predominantly investing in various iterations of Claude Opus, particularly the more recent versions. Opus, the predecessor to Mythos, remains openly available and popular, with Anthropic having released a new version, Opus 4.8, in late May. Mythos had only been available to limited users since April, and Fable 5 was operational for mere days before its shutdown, meaning their direct contribution to Anthropic’s market share growth was marginal compared to the enduring strength of the Opus series.

Bottom Line

Anthropic’s journey reflects a fascinating paradox: a company experiencing explosive growth and IPO-readiness even as it navigates — and perhaps benefits from — high-profile government controversies. While the implications for its IPO timeline remain uncertain, given public market investors’ typical aversion to regulatory entanglements, the underlying data unequivocally demonstrates that Anthropic’s core AI models are resonating more powerfully with businesses than ever before. This ongoing drama, far from hindering its progress, might just be solidifying Anthropic’s image as a developer of truly advanced, impactful, and — by some measures — formidably powerful AI. The “aura of danger” could well be a unique selling proposition in the high-stakes world of artificial intelligence.