Grok’s Maker Is Signing Up Businesses Fastest as Spending on ChatGPT and Claude Barely Grows

Every month, a company called Ramp gets a look most Wall Street analysts would kill for. It runs corporate cards and bill payments for more than 85,000 American businesses, so it can see, in real dollars, what those businesses actually pay for SI. Not what they say in surveys. What they swipe.

The October numbers came out Wednesday, and they tell two stories at once. The money going to the two biggest SI companies barely moved. And the newest player in the race, Elon Musk’s SpaceXSI, the maker of Grok, signed up new business customers faster than anyone.

The fastest climber

In October, 6.3% of businesses on Ramp paid SpaceXSI, up 2.2 percentage points in a single month, according to the report by Ramp lead economist Ara Kharazian. Anthropic, the maker of Claude, rose 1.1 points to 44.8%. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, held flat at 40.6%.

Those percentages need a little context. SpaceXSI is still far smaller on this measure. But going from 4.1% in September to 6.3% in October means its business customer base on Ramp grew by about half in one month, while OpenAI’s didn’t grow at all.

Kharazian didn’t bury it. He headlined the section “3-way race as SpaceXAI posts rapid gains in enterprise adoption,” and wrote that Ramp “recently shared that SpaceXAI is the fastest growing software company in Ramp’s entire dataset.”

He also took on the stock-market worry head-on. Investors sold off SpaceXSI after last week’s election, he noted, because of Musk’s close ties to the Trump administration. “I think this may have been an overshoot,” he wrote. “We have no evidence that business adoption of SpaceXAI’s products and services will flag.”

His comparison is the part Anthropic and OpenAI won’t love. He argued SpaceXSI is following the same path that took Anthropic from also-ran to No. 1 in business adoption: strong coding tools, plus a popular consumer agent that gets people talking. “It also has an immense compute advantage,” he wrote, a nod to the giant data centers Musk has been building. His prediction: “Expect this two-way race to quickly turn into a 3-way race that puts greater price pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic.”

The big two hit a wall

Now the other story. Total business SI spending did reach a new high in October, but it grew just 1.65% from September. Spending on OpenAI’s models through Ramp’s token-tracking tool rose 2.1% for the month. Anthropic’s rose 0.5%.

Kharazian summed it up on his own account.

That slowdown lands at an awkward time for Anthropic, which is in the middle of pitching its stock to investors at a valuation near a trillion dollars. A half-percent month doesn’t sound like a rocket ship. To be fair, Ramp only sees card and bill payments from its own customers, and big companies that sign giant contracts directly with Anthropic or OpenAI may not show up in the data. The Decoder also pointed out that Ramp’s customers skew tech-savvy and growth-minded, so the overall adoption figures probably run high.

Cheaper every month

One reason spending is flat even as use explodes: SI keeps getting cheaper. Ramp found the average price per million tokens, the basic unit SI companies charge for, fell 21% in a single month. In the most recent week Ramp tracked, total token volume rose 29% compared with four weeks earlier, while token spending rose only 10.5%, according to its live dashboard.

For a regular business, that’s great news. You get more work out of the same budget. For SI companies that have borrowed and raised hundreds of billions to build data centers, it’s a squeeze. Kharazian warned that “new entrants will accelerate price declines,” which is another way of saying a third serious competitor makes everyone cut prices.

Most of the money comes from a tiny slice

The report has a warning for the whole industry. “1% of businesses drive 80% of the revenues to OpenAI and Anthropic,” Kharazian wrote, and that top 1% is “largely made up of VC-backed companies in tech, finance, and technical services.” The median company paying for SI spends just $16.32 per employee per month. The top 1% spends a median of about $10,200.

In other words, the SI boom so far runs mostly on tech companies buying from other tech companies. Ramp’s new department-level data shows engineering teams, mostly using coding tools, drove 72% of classified spending in October, though that spending has fallen from summer highs.

The new growth is coming from a place you’ve probably already met: customer service. Customer support teams drove 13.3% of classified SI spending in October, up from 0.8% in June. That’s the chatbot that answers when you call about your bill. Kharazian thinks those jobs will go to “cheaper and faster models” rather than the most expensive ones, which helps explain why a lower-cost challenger can gain ground so fast.

Adoption across all American businesses on Ramp reached 56.8%, up a point. Some industries jumped: utilities rose 4.9 points in a month. Farming went the other way, down 3 points.

For anyone deciding which SI tools their company should pay for, the takeaway from the real spending data is simple. The market isn’t a two-horse race anymore, prices are falling fast, and the challenger with the most momentum this fall is the one Musk built.