At the start of 2026, OpenAI’s share was less than 25%. Last month, it was nearly 50%.
Those numbers come from a report built on data from OpenRouter and seen by the Wall Street Journal. They cover the category OpenAI has spent this year trying to win back from Anthropic: coding and productivity. That’s where enterprise customers buy compute in bulk, and it’s where Anthropic has been the one to beat.
If the data holds up, OpenAI has made serious progress against that lead. It’s also a sign that the company’s recent cuts to its side projects weren’t just for show.
Who OpenRouter is measuring
Before you treat this as a full scoreboard, look at where the numbers come from. OpenRouter sends a user’s requests to models from different AI companies, picking automatically based on whatever that user wants to optimize for, like price or performance.
Think of a service that sits on top of all your streaming apps and grabs the movie you want from whichever one has the highest resolution or charges the least. OpenRouter does that, except with AI compute.
And that matters for how you read the results. Its data comes largely from “AI-native startups,” the WSJ said, with some legacy tech companies mixed in. So this is a view of one slice of the market: customers who route traffic through a broker and can switch models whenever the trade-offs change. It’s a useful signal. It isn’t a census of every enterprise contract.
OpenAI stopped doing side quests
The shift lines up with a reset inside OpenAI. In March, word got out that the company was hitting refresh on its whole approach.
Sora, its odd social media app built around video generation, has since disappeared. OpenAI also paused, indefinitely, its plans to release some kind of erotica generator.
Fidji Simo, who was OpenAI’s CEO of applications at the time, laid out the reasoning in a meeting, according to the WSJ. “We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,” Simo said.
“We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front,” Simo added, according to the Journal.
That’s a blunt thing for an executive to say about her own company’s products. And going by OpenRouter’s numbers, the startups picking models on price and performance noticed the change. Any company paying for Anthropic models on the strength of an early-2026 comparison should run that comparison again, because the share split it was based on has moved by about 25 points since January.
