Flagship AI model draws just 11% of enterprise’s Anthropic spending

Anthropic's most powerful AI model is finding few takers. More than two months after launch, the company's flagship Fable 5 accounts for just 6% of tokens and about 11% of dollars that businesses spend on Anthropic's tools, according to data from payments company Ramp, which analyzed spending across 70,000 companies. The Financial Times first reported the trend on Saturday, noting that U.S. customers are gravitating toward more affordable alternatives.kucoin+2

Cheaper Models Win on Price

The slow uptake reflects a new reality in enterprise AI: most business tasks do not require the most powerful model available. Fable 5 costs roughly $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, making it about twice as expensive as OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, which has attracted greater enterprise spending despite lower benchmark scores. "Most people don't need to operate at the frontier," said Accel partner Miles Clements, adding that the period when customers mostly chose flagship models "was not a sustainable era".anthropic+3

Anthropic has moved to address the gap. In late July, the company launched Claude Opus 5, a mid-tier model priced at $5 per million input tokens that it described as coming "close to the frontier intelligence of Claude Fable 5 at half the price". Ramp data shows Opus 5 has already overtaken Fable 5 in enterprise spending. Average prices paid for Anthropic's models have dropped by nearly 25% since mid-July. Chinese competitors like DeepSeek are applying further pressure, offering comparable performance at under $1 per million tokens.kucoin+2

Questions for the IPO

Despite Fable 5's tepid reception, Anthropic continues to grow rapidly. Its annualized revenue run rate reached $65 billion in July, up from $47 billion in May, and the company posted an adjusted operating profit for the first time in the second quarter. It leads U.S. business AI adoption, with 43.5% of companies paying for its products in July compared with 39.7% for OpenAI.econlab.substack+1

Still, the July revenue figure fell short of the most optimistic investor forecasts, which had projected a run rate exceeding $80 billion. Ramp chief economist Ara Kharazian noted the difficulty of forecasting Anthropic's trajectory, saying, "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".kucoin

What It Means for the Industry

The pattern carries broader implications for an industry preparing for a wave of public offerings. Anthropic's expected IPO could value the company at up to $2 trillion, but the willingness of enterprise buyers to settle for cheaper, adequate models challenges the economics that valuation depends on. As Kharazian's Ramp data suggests, Fable 5 may have revealed a new ceiling for what businesses will pay for AI — a finding that could reshape pricing strategies not just for Anthropic, but across the industry.gurufocus+1