A report based on data from OpenRouter, and seen by the Wall Street Journal, shows that OpenAI has made what looks like massive progress in its effort this year to contend with Anthropic’s dominance in coding and productivity—the sort of tasks that involve enterprise customers buying compute on a massive scale.
At the beginning of 2026, OpenAI’s share was less than 25%. Last month, it was nearly 50%, according to the report.
OpenRouter is a company that automatically routes compute from AI companies to a user based on whatever attributes they’re seeking to optimize for, like price and performance. Imagine a routing service for all the streaming services that automatically picks a source for the movie you want based on, say, whether it’s the highest resolution, or whether it’s the cheapest. It’s a little like that, but for AI compute.
OpenRouter’s data, it should be noted, comes largely from “AI-native startups,” but mixed in are also some legacy tech companies, the WSJ says.
In March, it emerged that OpenAI was hitting refresh on its whole deal. Sora, its wacky video generation-based social media app, has since gone away. It also paused plans indefinitely that were geared toward releasing some kind of erotica generator. “We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,” Fidji Simo, who at the time was OpenAI’s CEO of applications said in a meeting, according to the WSJ. “We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front,” Simo reportedly added.
