Anthropic Dominates UK SME AI Spending as Adoption Surges 1,000% Since 2023

Small UK businesses are rapidly integrating artificial intelligence into their daily operations, with adoption rates among SME cardholders jumping from 1.1% to 12.8% in just over three years. This 1,000% surge, coupled with a dramatic shift in spending toward Anthropic, signals a fundamental change in how fintech-enabled SMEs allocate their technology budgets to maintain a competitive edge.

What was announced

Analysis of internal business credit card transaction data from UK SME cardholders between Q1 2023 and Q2 2026 reveals a massive surge in AI adoption. The proportion of small firms spending on AI tools has risen from a negligible 1.1% at the start of 2023 to 12.8% by the second quarter of 2026. While AI still represents a relatively small fraction of total SME expenditure at 0.146%, the nearly 30-fold growth in budget allocation indicates that these tools are transitioning from experimental toys to essential business infrastructure.

The data highlights a significant shift in provider dominance. Anthropic, the developer of the Claude model, has surged ahead to capture 54.1% of all SME AI expenditure in the dataset by Q2 2026. This is a stark contrast to OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, which accounted for 27.3% of spend in the same period. This reversal is particularly striking given the historical context: in 2024, OpenAI held more than 70% of the market spend, while Anthropic fluctuated between 1.6% and 6.6%. Even as recently as Q1 2026, OpenAI maintained the lead with 41.8% of spend compared to Anthropic’s 34%.

Despite Anthropic’s lead in total spend, OpenAI remains the more widely used provider, reaching 65.2% of AI-buying businesses compared to Anthropic's 48.9%. This suggests a "multi-model" approach is becoming the norm, with more than a quarter of AI-buying SMEs now paying for two or more providers simultaneously. The rapid shift in spending—Anthropic saw a 40.3-fold year-on-year growth—demonstrates how quickly SME loyalty can flip within a single quarter as new models and capabilities are released.

"I'm hugely optimistic about what AI means for small businesses. For most of my career the big companies had the edge: more people, more specialists, more budget. AI is closing that gap fast. A three-person firm can now do its own research, marketing, bookkeeping and customer service to a standard that used to need a department. More than one in eight of the small businesses in our data are already buying AI tools, and the pace is accelerating, not levelling off."

Damian Brychcy, Chief Executive Officer at Capital on Tap.

The companies involved

Capital on Tap is a specialist provider of business credit cards and spend management tools designed specifically for the SME market. Since its inception, the firm has positioned itself as a primary financial partner for small businesses, providing the data-driven insights that allow for this type of granular analysis of UK business spending habits. The company has been a frequent subject of industry analysis, appearing in 15 FF News reports regarding its role in the evolving SME lending and payments landscape.

The AI landscape described in the data is dominated by two major players. OpenAI, the company behind the ubiquitous ChatGPT, has been the primary driver of the generative AI boom and remains the most widely adopted platform among the businesses surveyed. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI executives, has positioned its Claude models as high-performance alternatives, focusing on safety and sophisticated reasoning. Both companies have become central to the fintech ecosystem, with OpenAI featuring in 48 FF News stories and Anthropic in 42, reflecting their growing influence on how financial services and small businesses operate in a digital-first economy.

What FF News has reported before

The shift in SME spending mirrors a broader trend of AI integration across the financial services sector. FF News recently covered how OpenAI Debuts ChatGPT for Financial Services with GPT-6 Astra Integration, a move designed to deepen the model's utility for professional users. This follows other major integrations, such as when PitchBook Integrates Private Market Data into OpenAI’s ChatGPT for Financial Services and the launch of the Intapp and OpenAI Launch DealCloud Plug-In for Secure AI-Driven Financial Dealmaking. Beyond the LLM providers themselves, the payments infrastructure is also evolving, as seen when Mastercard Launches Agent Connect to Power the Future of AI-Powered Shopping, highlighting the industry-wide push to prepare merchants for an AI-driven economy.

What this means

The data from Capital on Tap confirms that AI has moved from a discretionary "nice-to-have" to a fixed line item in the SME budget. For the fintech sector, this represents a new category of SaaS spend that is remarkably volatile; the fact that Anthropic could overtake OpenAI in spend within a single quarter suggests that brand loyalty is secondary to model performance. This puts immense pressure on incumbents to justify their subscription costs as SMEs become more disciplined about "cutting duplication." The rise of multi-provider households among small firms also suggests that the market is not heading toward a "winner-takes-all" scenario, but rather a fragmented ecosystem where different models are used for specific tasks.