ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Programming is AI’s killer app.
- The highest enterprise AI, particularly for programming, is Anthropic.
- Open-source AI is lagging behind its proprietary opponents.
For those who had been to ask J. Random Person on the road what the preferred enterprise AI Giant Language Mannequin (LLM) is, I guess you they’d say OpenAI‘s ChatGPT. As of mid-2025, nonetheless, Anthropic is the leading enterprise LLM provider, with 32% of enterprise utilization, in line with Menlo Ventures, an early-stage enterprise capital agency.
Earlier than you get too excited, although, remember that Menlo Ventures is a significant Anthropic investor. The agency has backed the corporate by way of a number of important funding rounds, together with main their Sequence D spherical and taking part of their $3.5 billion Sequence E, which valued Anthropic at $61.5 billion.
Additionally: What happened when Anthropic’s Claude AI ran a small shop for a month (spoiler: it got weird)
In different phrases, Menlo Ventures has billions of causes to reward Anthropic. That mentioned, others additionally view Anthropic as the highest enterprise AI firm. As AI Journal put it, “Anthropic has established itself as the premier enterprise AI company by way of its Claude household of LLMs, reaching outstanding 1,000% year-over-year progress to achieve $3 billion in annual recurring income.” Even by hyper-aggressive AI requirements, that is actual progress.
Behind Anthropic, you may discover OpenAI, which now has 25%; Google with 20%; and Meta Llama with 9%. All the way in which within the again, with a mere 1% you may discover DeepSeek, adopted by the remainder of the pack. Menlo Ventures credit Anthropic’s fast ascent to the robust efficiency of its Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus fashions.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s dad or mum firm, filed an April 2025 lawsuit towards OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in coaching and working its AI programs.)
These numbers mirror the proportion of manufacturing AI use, not spending. They had been derived from a survey of 150 technical decision-makers at enterprises and startups constructing AI functions in the summertime of 2025.
What’s behind Anthropic’s success?
Three various factors are driving Anthropic’s rise. The primary is what Menlo Ventures calls “AI’s first killer app”: Code era. Whereas AI-created code quality remains questionable, however, extra builders are utilizing AI programming instruments than ever, and Claude has grow to be programmers’ best choice with 42% of the market share. That is double OpenAI’s 21% share.
There are concrete examples of Anthropic growth applications gaining recognition. For example, in only one yr, Claude helped rework GitHub Copilot right into a $1.9-billion ecosystem. Claude Sonnet 3.5‘s 2024 launch confirmed how LLM breakthroughs could make attainable totally new classes corresponding to AI IDEs, Cursor and Windsurf; vibe app builders, Lovable, Bolt, and Replit; and enterprise coding brokers, Claude Code and All Arms.
One more reason Anthropic is successful is its use of reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to coach its LLMs. Behind that difficult title lies a easy idea: You present clear, binary suggestions (1 for proper, 0 for incorrect) on the mannequin’s output. This works properly for programming AI instruments, the place the code both works or would not.
Anthropic has additionally led the way in which to LLMs that take step-by-step approaches to fixing issues and use exterior instruments to drag in information to ship higher solutions. Briefly, Anthropic has been a frontrunner in creating AI agents. Moreover serving to individuals and programmers, this strategy might help LLMs iteratively enhance their responses and combine instruments like search, calculators, coding environments, and different assets by way of the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This new open-source protocol permits LLMs and AI brokers to seamlessly join with the huge, ever-changing panorama of real-world information, instruments, and companies.
Additionally: 7 strategic insights business and IT leaders need for AI transformation in 2025
That is vital as a result of Menlo Ventures additionally discovered that it isn’t worth that drives firms to alter LLMs, it is efficiency. “This creates an surprising market dynamic: At the same time as particular person fashions drop 10x in worth, builders do not seize financial savings by utilizing older fashions; they only transfer en masse to the best-performing one.”
This dynamic could change as soon as LLMs begin to mature and fashions start to achieve comparable efficiency ranges. For now, although, as LLMs enhance massively from one launch to a different, firms are prepared to pay for the latest and quickest.
AI within the enterprise
The research additionally discovered that firms are steadily shifting from constructing and coaching fashions to inference, that’s, with fashions truly operating in manufacturing. Startups are main the way in which, with 74% of builders now stating that the majority of their workloads are in manufacturing. Giant enterprises aren’t far behind, with 49% reporting that the majority or practically all of their computer systems are in manufacturing. Briefly, enterprises at the moment are utilizing AI, not merely constructing AI.
Lastly, the researchers mentioned that open-source LLMs have declined to 13% of AI workloads at the moment from 19% six months in the past. The market chief stays Llama, albeit that Llama isn’t really open source.
Additionally: How agentic AI is transforming the very foundations of business strategy
However, extra open-source LLMs have been showing. These embrace new fashions from DeepSeek (V3, R1), Bytedance Seed (Doubao), Minimax (Textual content 1), Alibaba (Qwen 3), Moonshot AI (Kimi K2), and Z AI (GLM 4.5) within the final six months.
They’re simply not used a lot. That is as a result of, regardless of their benefits, “larger customization, potential value financial savings, and the flexibility to deploy inside personal cloud or on-premises environments,” their efficiency has continued to “path frontier, closed-source fashions.” Add in that lots of the best-performing open-source LLMs up to now are from Chinese language firms that Western companies are cautious of, and open-source LLMs look like stalling out.
Additionally: Anthropic tripled its revenue in 5 months – and this is why
So what does all this result in?
“Predicting the way forward for AI generally is a idiot’s errand. The market adjustments by the week, with thrilling new mannequin launches, developments in basis mannequin capabilities, and plunging prices,” Menlo Ventures mentioned. Nonetheless, “situations are ripe for a brand new era of putting up with AI companies to be constructed on high of at the moment’s foundational constructing blocks.”
The query stays, nonetheless, “What is going to these foundational constructing blocks be?” OpenAI? Google, Meta? Anthropic? Keep tuned. We’re not but near with the ability to say which AI fashions will finally find yourself on high.
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