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- Simon Willison — Creator of Datasette; co-creator of Django/
- Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive/
Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-08-29)
- Simon Willison’s post highlights that despite Anthropic’s substantial annualized revenue growth (reaching $65bn in July 2026) and expected profitability, their top-tier “Fable 5” AI model is struggling to gain user adoption.
- The “Ramp AI index,” which tracks model adoption via billing data from 70,000 companies, shows that in July 2026, Fable 5 accounted for only 8.0% of Anthropic model spend, significantly less than older/cheaper models like Opus 4.8 (28.0%) and Sonnet 4.6 (8.3%).
- For comparison, OpenAI’s annualized revenue also surged to over $40bn, with the launch of GPT 5.6 in July significantly boosting their performance.
- The data suggests that even in the rapidly evolving AI market, cost-effectiveness remains a critical driver for adoption, with users often preferring cheaper, sufficiently capable models over the most advanced (and likely more expensive) options.