Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

<p><strong><a href="https://www.ft.com/content/5ee49718-c258-4f01-aa32-7e5b76ae5245">Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive</a></strong></p> A few interesting numbers in this FT story gathered from "people with knowledge of the matter":</p> <ul> <li>Anthropic's "annualized revenue" for July is up to $65bn - it was $47bn in May, and I collected <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/29/anthropic/">more historic numbers here</a>.</li> <li>Anthropic expect Q3 to be profitable according to the same model they used to declare Q2 profitable. "It also told investors that it had 6,000 customers that spend $100,000 annually or more."</li> <li>As for OpenAI, "annualised revenue has jumped 35 per cent in the quarter to date and is now over $40bn, with the launch of GPT 5.6 in July jolting the company’s performance after a sluggish start to the year".</li> </ul> <p>This article also introduced me to the <a href="https://ramp.com/data/ai-index">Ramp AI index</a>, which uses billing data from 70,000 Ramp credit card using companies to estimate model adoption.</p> <p>Here's Ramp's breakdown of Anthropic model spend for July 2026, which looks reasonable given that Opus 5 was only released on July 24th, and supports the idea that Fable's cost has made it a less popular model:</p> <ol> <li>Opus 4.8: 28.0%</li> <li>Sonnet 4.6: 8.3%</li> <li>Fable 5: 8.0%</li> <li>Opus 4.6: 6.9%</li> <li>Sonnet 5: 3.6%</li> <li>Opus 5: 3.5%</li> <li>Opus 4.7: 1.7%</li> <li>Sonnet 4.5: 1.3%</li> <li>Haiku 4.5: 1.0%</li> <li>Opus 4.5: 0.7%</li> </ol> <p><small></small>Via <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411102">Hacker News</a></small></p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/openai">openai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/anthropic">