Anthropic’s glorous plan to flog its cleverest AI at premium prices is wobbling as US customers pick cheaper tools.
According to the Financial Times, spending on Fable 5, Anthropic’s biggest and most expensive model, has stalled at about 11 per cent of total outlay on its tools. That is more than two months after launch, according to Ramp data covering 70,000 companies.
The shift breaks the usual habit of corporate punters defaulting to the shiniest and most powerful models. Analysts and investors reckon Fable’s price, plus the fact that older models do most business jobs well enough, is driving the change.
Accel partner Miles Clements, whose firm has invested nearly $1 billion in Anthropic, said: “Most people don’t need to operate at the frontier.” The spell when customers picked only frontier models “was not a durable era.”
Fable 5’s early June launch was derailed when the Trump administration forced Anthropic to pull it, citing national security concerns. Access worries eased after the White House cleared a 1 July relaunch, leaving price and performance as the bigger headaches.
The weak appetite for Fable adds IPO awkwardness for Anthropic, which investors expect could be valued at $2 trillion or more. The float could arrive as soon as next month, which is handy timing for anyone who enjoys selling rocket fuel with a damp match.
Anthropic told shareholders that July revenue hit $65 billion on an annualised basis, up from $47 billion in May, but less than bullish hopes of $80 billion. CEO Dario Amodei’s outfit is still growing fast, with revenue nearly seven times higher since the start of the year.
The company logged its first adjusted operating profit in the second quarter and told investors it expects to be profitable again in the third. It said it had 6,000 customers spending $100,000 or more a year, while Anthropic declined to comment.
OpenAI appears to be making up ground after slipping earlier in 2026, with annualised revenue rising 35 per cent this quarter to more than $40 billion. GPT 5.6 launched in July and costs far less than Fable 5, while Anthropic’s cheaper Opus 5 has already beaten Fable for business spending since its late July launch, according to Ramp.
Ramp chief economist Ara Kharazian said data retention rules imposed by the Trump administration had hurt Fable adoption.
“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 said.
