Anthropic's share of business AI spend fell from three-quarters to half this year
OpenRouter, a service that routes requests to different AI models, told the Wall Street Journal that among roughly 120,000 companies using both OpenAI and Anthropic through its platform, Anthropic took about 75% of the spending in January and the two split it almost evenly by September. The paper ties the shift to OpenAI's price cuts, including an 80% cut to its smallest model in July. On 7th Oct'26, Anthropic replied with Claude Haiku 5.5, which it says costs around 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5.
What it actually means
The number that matters is the 120,000 companies already paying both labs, because it shows how many teams now treat the model as a part they swap when the price moves. OpenRouter's customers are mostly AI-native startups, so this is not the whole market, but it is the part that tends to move first, and one customer told the paper that the days of sticking with a single provider are over.
If your prompts and integrations only work with one lab, you pay whatever that lab charges next year. Keep a set of real tasks with known good answers and run them against a second provider every quarter, so that switching becomes a configuration change rather than a rebuild. Haiku 5.5 is worth that test now, but Anthropic's own page says its new tokenizer uses slightly more tokens per task, so price a week of your real requests rather than the rate card.
A model you can't swap out is a price you can't negotiate.
120,000companies paying both OpenAI and Anthropic through OpenRouter
Source: The Wall Street Journal · Saturday 10 October 2026