Anthropic's Priciest AI Model Stalls as Cheaper Rivals Win Enterprise
The FT reports Fable 5 has plateaued at about 11% of enterprise spending on Anthropic tools, as cheaper in-house models and Chinese open-weight options like Kimi K3 gain ground.
What happened
Anthropic's flagship AI model is struggling to win paying corporate customers. The Financial Times reported on August 23 that Fable 5 — the company's most powerful and most expensive model — has plateaued at roughly 11 percent of enterprise spending on Anthropic's tools, more than two months after its release.
The data
The figures come from payments company Ramp, which analysed billing data from 70,000 US businesses. Cheaper Anthropic models are taking over: Opus 5, released in late July, has already overtaken Fable 5, while the older Opus 4.8 climbed from around 15 percent in early June to more than 50 percent by late July. Cost-effective Chinese open-weight models such as Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 are pulling users away too.
Why it matters
The shift breaks the industry assumption that companies always adopt the most capable model first. Anthropic told investors July annualised revenue reached $65bn, up from $47bn in May but short of the $80bn some had expected, and it expects a profitable third quarter. OpenAI's annualised revenue has jumped 35 percent this quarter to over $40bn, helped by the cheaper GPT-5.6. With an IPO ahead, the lesson is clear: price and value, not raw capability alone, now drive enterprise AI spending.