TLDR
- Spending on Anthropic’s Fable 5, its most expensive model, has plateaued at just 11% of total Anthropic AI spending among US companies
- Enterprise users are saving flagship models for complex tasks and using cheaper models for routine work
- Anthropic’s annualized revenue hit $65 billion in July, falling short of the $80 billion investor target
- OpenAI’s GPT-5.6, a cheaper frontier model, has helped push its annualized revenue up to $40 billion
- Experts are split on whether falling Fable 5 adoption hurts Anthropic overall or simply reflects a healthy mix of model use
Spending on Anthropic’s most advanced AI model, Fable 5, has stalled. Data from 70,000 US companies collected by payments firm Ramp shows it now accounts for just 11% of total spending on Anthropic’s AI tools.
🇺🇸 Anthropic seems to have built one of the best models available but its customers don’t appear willing to pay much more to use it – FT
➡ Will the company building the best model actually be the one capturing the most value?
1️⃣ At Anthropic, Fable 5 remains relatively… pic.twitter.com/PUFvvvzNTJ
— Christophe Barraud 🇫🇷 🇲🇨 (@C_Barraud) August 23, 2026
The trend shows that businesses are not abandoning Anthropic entirely. Instead, they are using cheaper models, including older Anthropic products and open-weight models from Chinese competitors, for most tasks.
Frontier models are being saved for the most complex jobs. The pattern suggests companies are becoming more selective about when they reach for the most expensive tools.
Miles Clements, a partner at Accel, which has invested $1 billion in Anthropic, told the Financial Times that the era when customers favored only frontier models “was not a durable era.”
Fable 5 launched in June under a cloud of controversy. Reports of its ability to launch cyberattacks autonomously drew attention, and the Trump administration temporarily barred Anthropic from selling the model to foreign customers over national security concerns before lifting those restrictions.
Even after the restrictions were lifted, adoption of Fable 5 has lagged behind earlier Anthropic model launches.
Anthropic Revenue Misses Targets as OpenAI Closes the Gap
Anthropic’s annualized revenue reached $65 billion in July. That number falls short of the $80 billion target that some investors had set ahead of the company’s expected IPO.
OpenAI has been recovering ground it lost to Anthropic earlier this year. Its annualized revenue has risen to $40 billion, helped by GPT-5.6, a newer model that costs less to use than Fable 5.
The cheaper pricing of GPT-5.6 appears to be drawing users who might otherwise have stayed with Anthropic. Reuters reported OpenAI cut developer pricing on the model by more than 20%.
Some analysts say the Fable 5 spending numbers do not tell the full story. Alex Imas of Google DeepMind argued that Anthropic cares about total spending across all its models, not just Fable 5 in isolation.
“Spending on Fable can go down and it would still add value if it’s complementary to the other models,” he wrote.
Ara Kharazian, chief economist at Ramp, said predicting where either company is headed is extremely difficult.
“If you impute previous trends you expect Anthropic to own the market. But because OpenAI’s newest model was so good and Fable underperformed, it’s been the reverse,” he told the Financial Times.
The shift comes at a key moment for Anthropic, which is preparing for a multitrillion dollar IPO and will need strong growth numbers to justify its valuation.
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