OpenAI began 2026 holding under 25% of the market. By last month, that figure had climbed to almost 50%.
The figures come from a report based on OpenRouter data and reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. They track coding and productivity, the segment OpenAI has spent this year trying to take back from Anthropic. Enterprise customers buy compute in bulk in this segment, and Anthropic has been the leader to catch.
If the data is accurate, OpenAI has made serious progress against Anthropic’s lead. It also suggests the company’s recent cuts to its side projects were more than a gesture.
Who OpenRouter is measuring
Before reading this as a complete scoreboard, consider the source. OpenRouter forwards a user’s requests to models from various AI companies and chooses one automatically based on what that user wants to optimize for, such as price or performance.
Picture a service that sits above all your streaming apps and pulls the movie you want from whichever one offers the highest resolution or the lowest price. OpenRouter works the same way, but for AI compute.
That affects how the results should be read. According to the WSJ, the data comes mostly from “AI-native startups,” along with some legacy tech companies. It therefore covers one part of the market: customers who send traffic through a broker and can change models whenever the trade-offs shift. It’s a meaningful signal, but it doesn’t account for every enterprise contract.
OpenAI stopped doing side quests
The change coincides with a reset inside OpenAI. In March, reports emerged that the company was rethinking its entire strategy.
Sora, its unusual video-generation social media app, has since disappeared. OpenAI also indefinitely shelved plans to launch some form of erotica generator.
According to the WSJ, Fidji Simo, who was OpenAI’s CEO of applications at the time, explained the thinking in a meeting. “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.
Executives rarely speak that bluntly about their own company’s products. Based on OpenRouter’s numbers, the startups that choose models on price and performance noticed the shift. Any company paying for Anthropic models because of a comparison made in early 2026 should run it again, since the share split behind it has moved about 25 points since January.