OpenAI closes in on Anthropic in OpenRouter coding data

At the start of 2026, OpenAI handled less than a quarter of the coding and productivity work passing through OpenRouter. Last month it handled nearly half, according to a report built on OpenRouter data and seen by The Wall Street Journal. Earlier this year it was Anthropic that edged to the front of the AI race, with cutting-edge models and a coding tool that corporate America loved.

At a glance

• OpenAI spent 2026 narrowing its gap with Anthropic in coding and productivity, the enterprise work where customers buy compute at massive scale, after dropping side projects like Sora in March.
• OpenRouter sends each request to whichever AI provider best fits what the customer optimizes for, such as price or performance, so its share figures track where that routed traffic actually lands.
• The sample leans heavily on AI-native startups with some legacy tech companies mixed in, while Menlo Ventures' December 2025 survey of enterprise API spend had Anthropic at 40% to OpenAI's 27%.

If you have not been following, Anthropic spent 2023 to 2025 taking enterprise business from OpenAI. Menlo Ventures' December 2025 report put Anthropic at 40% of enterprise LLM API spend against 27% for OpenAI and 21% for Google, with OpenAI down from 50% and Anthropic up from 12% since 2023. According to Report AI, coding drove the shift: Claude Code reached $1 billion in annualized revenue within six months of its May 2025 launch.

OpenAI's share of OpenRouter coding work went from under 25% to nearly 50% this year

The report seen by the WSJ looks at coding and productivity, the tasks where enterprise customers buy compute on a massive scale. At the beginning of 2026, OpenAI's share of that work on OpenRouter was less than 25%. Last month it was nearly 50%.

Anthropic, meanwhile, was struggling to keep up with its own success. Demand for Claude Code in the spring was so strong that the company faced frequent outages and a computing crunch, the WSJ writes, and by some measures OpenAI is now hot on its heels.

OpenAI's own coding tool has been growing as well. According to Presenc AI, OpenAI reported more than 5 million weekly Codex users on June 2, 2026, the last figure it gave for Codex alone.

OpenAI shut down Sora and paused an erotica generator after a March reset

The turn came in March, when it emerged that OpenAI was hitting refresh on its whole approach. Sora, its video-generation social media app, has since gone away, and OpenAI paused plans for some kind of erotica generator indefinitely.

The new direction was spelled out by Fidji Simo, at the time OpenAI's CEO of applications, who said in a meeting, according to the WSJ, that the company could not afford to be distracted:

We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests.

Simo reportedly added: "We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front." Coding and productivity are the same category of work that the OpenRouter report tracks.

Trackers built on spend and paid adoption count different things than OpenRouter does

Other trackers have been telling a different story, partly because they count different things: API spend, paid business adoption, production usage or web traffic. None of them can be compared directly with OpenRouter's routing data.

According to About Chromebooks, citing Ramp's transaction data, April 2026 was the first month Anthropic led OpenAI in the share of U.S. businesses paying, at 34.4% against 32.3%, after OpenAI's adoption peaked at 36.8% in December 2025. By August 2026 the same data showed Anthropic at 43.8% against OpenAI's 39.8%. Ramp's April analysis also found that 52% of its customers using Anthropic or OpenAI used both.

OpenAI's biggest advantage sits outside the API market. ChatGPT has around 900 million weekly users, against an estimated 30 million for Claude, and Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service and Copilot put GPT models inside many companies by default. Consumer use and enterprise API use are separate markets, though.

OpenRouter picks a provider for every request based on price or performance

OpenRouter sits between developers and the companies that sell AI compute. A customer says what it wants to optimize for, such as price or performance, and OpenRouter automatically sends each request to whichever provider fits best. Picture a service sitting on top of all your streaming subscriptions that, for the movie you want, picks the source with the highest resolution or the lowest price.

That design is why the share figures move the way they do. When OpenAI's share of routed coding and productivity work rises, more of those requests are landing on OpenAI models instead of Anthropic's. A single customer can also split its traffic between vendors, which matches Ramp's finding that about half of these buyers already pay both.

The weak spot is the sample. OpenRouter's data comes largely from AI-native startups, with some legacy tech companies mixed in, and the report as described does not say whether share is counted in tokens, requests or dollars. In our view, the climb from under 25% to nearly 50% reads as a measure of where cost- and performance-shopping startups send their work, not of who is winning enterprise contracts.

Where the routing shift must show up. The WSJ report runs through last month, and no newer OpenRouter figure has been given. The real test is whether trackers built on spend start moving the same way, meaning Ramp's monthly transaction data and any future Menlo Ventures survey of enterprise API spend. No date has been given for the next update of either.