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Anthropic’s latest feud with the Trump admin may actually help it, sales data suggests
Anthropic had a tumultuous month. The AI lab surpassed OpenAI in business spending market share for the first time in May, raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, and filed confidential IPO paperwork after its first profitable quarter. However, on Friday, the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to ban non-Americans, including its employees, from accessing its latest models: the limited-release Mythos 5 and the public Fable 5. This forced Anthropic to pull both models from the market. The White House invoked an obscure export control directive, but the exact cause is unclear; chatter suggests hackers easily bypassed Fable 5’s guardrails, exposing Mythos’s dangerous capability to find software security flaws. This feud follows Anthropic’s earlier refusal to allow government use of its models for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, leading to a supply-chain risk declaration in March. Despite this, business adoption grew. Ramp’s lead economist Ara Kharazian says the controversy may boost Anthropic, noting its best adoption month came after the defense department labeled it a risk. Ramp’s data from over 70,000 businesses shows Anthropic’s share of AI subscriptions rose 2.5 percentage points in May to 41%, surpassing OpenAI’s 39.5% (which was flat). Businesses primarily spend on API calls to Claude Opus models, especially the latest Opus 4.8, which remain available. Mythos had only been released to limited users since April, and Fable 5 was shut down after days. The impact of the White House drama on Anthropic’s IPO prospects is uncertain, but its available models are more popular with businesses than ever.