One thing that could put a dent in the hype around Anthropic’s upcoming, multitrillion dollar IPO? People preferring cheapo models over its flagship AI products.
Recent spending data from 70,000 US companies collected by the payments group Ramp shows that spending on Fable 5, Anthropic’s priciest and most powerful model, has plateaued at only 11 percent of the overall outlay, or money spent, on its AI tools, the Financial Times reported.
It reflects a shift in how enterprise users are using flagship models, reserving them only for the most complex tasks while letting more than serviceable cheaper models take care of the dirty work. Those cheaper alternatives can be Anthropic’s own older models, or open-weight models offered by Chinese competitors.
If the pattern holds, according to the FT, it could upend the go-big-or-go-home business model of leading AI labs, which have focused on pouring their resources into building even larger and more complex models.
“Most people don’t need to operate at the frontier,” Miles Clements, a partner at the venture capital firm Accel, which has invested $1 billion in Anthropic, told the FT.
The period when customers favored using only frontier models “was not a durable era,” Clements added.
Fable 5 had a rocky launch in June. Its hype was clouded by its purportedly powerful ability to launch cyberattacks autonomously — a narrative that Anthropic helped fuel, it’s worth noting. The Trump administration ordered Anthropic to suspend access to its model to foreign customers, citing the national security risks posed by the model, but later lifted the export restrictions.
The hope that take-up of Fable 5 would accelerate once the political controversy cleared hasn’t been borne out, however, with the Anthropic model’s adoption lagging behind the releases of its previous frontier models. Its annualized revenue — the amount it’s projected to make in a year based on its current performance — in July reached $65 billion, which is well short of the $80 billion estimate set by bullish investors, the FT noted.
OpenAI, meanwhile, is nipping at Anthropic’s heels. After losing significant ground to Anthropic this year, the ChatGPT maker’s annualized revenue has surged to $40 billion, with its new GPT-5.6 model, which is much cheaper to use than Fable 5, boosting sales.
Some experts are seeing the plateaued Fable 5 spending as a glass half-full. Alex Imas, director of AGI economics at Google DeepMind, argued that Anthropic isn’t worried about Fable spending in isolation but the “total spend across all models.”
“A better way to read this graph,” he wrote, referring to the FT reporting, is ‘Fable is a great complement to the other models, which has increased overall revenue for Anthropic.'”
“Spending on Fable can go down and it would still add value if it’s complementary to the other models,” he added.
In any case, what this forecasts for the future of Anthropic or OpenAI is difficult to say. Ara Kharazian, chief economist at Ramp, called predicting their future virtually impossible.
“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 FT.
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