Anthropic is having a remarkable month. The AI lab finished May by surpassing OpenAI in market share of business spending for the first time, according to data analytics firm Ramp. It raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation (also besting OpenAI) in late May, then entered June by filing confidential paperwork for an IPO, reportedly buoyed by its first-ever profitable quarter.
Then, on Friday, the Trump administration escalated its conflict with the model maker. A letter from the White House demanded Anthropic ban non-Americans—including its own employees—from accessing its state-of-the-art models: the limited-release Mythos 5 and the more guarded version released to the public days earlier, called Fable 5. This effectively forced Anthropic to pull its most advanced model from the market altogether.
The White House cited an obscure export control directive when ordering the ban, but the exact cause remains unclear. Industry chatter suggests that hackers easily bypassed Fable 5’s guardrails, which were designed to prevent access to Mythos’s core capabilities. Mythos is so adept at identifying security flaws in software code that Anthropic itself marketed it as dangerous and restricted its public release.
This latest drama follows Anthropic’s earlier refusal to allow the government to use its models for mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons. In March, the Trump administration responded by declaring the company a supply-chain risk.
However, that designation did not deter Anthropic’s business sales. Quite the opposite, according to Ramp’s data. Ironically, this latest feud—which also appears to validate the hype around Mythos’s power—may help rather than hurt Anthropic, says Ara Kharazian, Ramp’s lead economist and the compiler of the business-spending AI data.
“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.”
Ramp’s data—drawn from over 70,000 businesses using its platform—isn’t granular enough to reveal the financial impact of pulling Mythos and Fable 5 from the market. Still, it shows that customers heavily use Anthropic’s Opus models and that business adoption continues to grow.
For instance, Anthropic’s share of AI subscriptions paid for by businesses rose 2.5 percentage points in May to 41%. This compares to OpenAI, which commanded 39.5% of AI subscriptions by its customers, essentially flat from the prior month. As of mid-2026, the rivalry remains fierce, but Anthropic appears to be turning regulatory friction into a business advantage.
via TechCrunch AI