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 rivals.
If you happen to have been to ask J. Random Consumer on the road what the most well-liked enterprise AI Massive 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 accordance 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 via a number of important funding rounds, together with main their Sequence D spherical and collaborating 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 via its Claude household of LLMs, reaching outstanding 1,000% year-over-year progress to succeed in $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 best way within the again, with a mere 1% you may discover DeepSeek, adopted by the remainder of the pack. Menlo Ventures credit Anthropic’s speedy ascent to the sturdy efficiency of its Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus fashions.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s guardian firm, filed an April 2025 lawsuit in opposition to 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 have 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 technology. Whereas AI-created code quality remains questionable, nonetheless, extra builders are utilizing AI programming instruments than ever, and Claude has turn into programmers’ best choice with 42% of the market share. That is double OpenAI’s 21% share.
There are concrete examples of Anthropic growth packages gaining recognition. As an example, in only one 12 months, Claude helped remodel 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 reminiscent of 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 profitable is its use of reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to coach its LLMs. Behind that difficult identify lies a easy idea: You present clear, binary suggestions (1 for proper, 0 for incorrect) on the mannequin’s output. This works nicely for programming AI instruments, the place the code both works or would not.
Anthropic has additionally led the best way to LLMs that take step-by-step approaches to fixing issues and use exterior instruments to tug in knowledge to ship higher solutions. Briefly, Anthropic has been a pacesetter in creating AI agents. Moreover serving to folks and programmers, this strategy might help LLMs iteratively enhance their responses and combine instruments like search, calculators, coding environments, and different sources through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This new open-source protocol allows LLMs and AI brokers to seamlessly join with the huge, ever-changing panorama of real-world knowledge, instruments, and providers.
Additionally: 7 strategic insights business and IT leaders need for AI transformation in 2025
That is necessary as a result of Menlo Ventures additionally discovered that it is not worth that drives firms to alter LLMs, it is efficiency. “This creates an sudden market dynamic: Whilst particular person fashions drop 10x in worth, builders do not seize financial savings through the use of older fashions; they only transfer en masse to the best-performing one.”
This dynamic might change as soon as LLMs begin to mature and fashions start to succeed in related efficiency ranges. For now, although, as LLMs enhance massively from one launch to a different, firms are keen to pay for the latest and quickest.
AI within the enterprise
The examine additionally discovered that firms are steadily shifting from constructing and coaching fashions to inference, that’s, with fashions really working in manufacturing. Startups are main the best way, with 74% of builders now stating that almost all of their workloads are in manufacturing. Massive enterprises aren’t far behind, with 49% reporting that almost all 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, “better customization, potential price financial savings, and the flexibility to deploy inside non-public 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 seem 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 modifications 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 technology of putting up with AI companies to be constructed on prime 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 having the ability to say which AI fashions will in the end find yourself on prime.
Get the morning’s prime tales in your inbox every day with our Tech Today newsletter.
