Claude leads the enterprise race: According to a July report by venture capital firm Menlo Ventures, Anthropic has the top market share among enterprises, at 32%. OpenAI’s AI models used to have the lead, holding 50% at the end of 2023. But its share has since declined to 25%. Google is at 20%, which experienced “strong growth” in recent months, the report said. (Microsoft, as OpenAI’s largest investor, uses and offers its AI models to clients.) Among open-source models, Meta’s Llama has a 9% share while AI startup DeepSeek accounts for 1%. Anthropic’s Claude began gaining momentum in June 2024, with the release of Claude Sonnet 3.5, Sonnet 3.7, Sonnet 4, Opus 4 and Claude Code. Another boost to Anthropic is its development of model context protocol (MCP), an open set of rules and standards that describe how AI models like Claude and Gemini can connect to tools, APIs, data sources and other agents. It can be broadly used in many industries, such as finance. For example, MCP is part of the new stack for intelligent commerce. Companies such as Visa are using it for intelligent commerce, enabling AI agents to interact with payments and other tools to autonomously and securely perform tasks. Menlo’s report also found is that enterprises prioritize performance over price and prefer closed, proprietary models over open-source ones. One reason is the performance of open-source AI models lags those of closed models by nine to 12 months. Another reason is the technical complexity of going at it alone and reluctance to use Chinese APIs. On the other hand, CFOs are more cost conscious.