Anthropic becomes the 'Apple of AI' as it grabs most revenue despite being the most expensive

Anthropic becomes the 'Apple of AI' as it grabs most revenue despite being the most expensive The Apple of my AI - Volume and spend on tokens for Anthropic’s AI solutions made it more revenue than any of its competitors in July 2026, cementing its position as the top LLM provider - This success is despite Anthropic’s tokens being more expensive than its competitors - The data was collated by Vercel’s AI Gateway, an API service that routes LLMs for easy AI provider swapping Monthly analysis of the AI industry has revealed a number of surprises for July 2026, not least the continued growth of Anthropic both in terms of revenue and token use. This is despite the company charging a higher rate for tokens, AI’s computational data currency. The data was compiled by agentic infrastructure company Vercel, whose AI Gateway is used by many major companies and developers, and found the price-per-token average across all analysed platforms fell following two months of growth in May and June. Despite the overall 37% increase in spend across the industry, the cost per token rate dropped. Anthropic growth Vercel’s analysis of transactions through its APIs has repeatedly demonstrated a dominance for Anthropic. Its reporting on gateway spend started in December 2025 and in every month since, Anthropic has had over 60% of the spend share, and in July that figure sat at 65.1% with 30% of the total volume (of all tokens sent through the Vercel AI Gateway). Yet the average price per token was on 4.4 times higher than the overall average across all AI labs. Token prices have rarely proved to be steady, with Vercel’s data reporting an average price drop of 13.6% after a 20% rise in May and little change in June. (For reference, the report’s definition of the price per token is the total spend divided by the total volume.) Despite a higher price per token, however, Anthropic’s price per token was lower in July, a change attributed to the return to public access of Claude Fable 5 after its temporary suspension. Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Monthly data collection Vercel’s monthly look at the data that flows through its API paints a fascinating picture not just of Anthropic’s growth, but of the performance (or otherwise) of its competitors. For example, it charts Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s surprise growth from May, through June; the report notes that “we said an open-weight lab would soon be second by volume. In July, DeepSeek surpassed Google to take that place.” DeepSeek’s growth over Google has proved to be a surprise, one that puts it in second place on volume. The real story is Anthropic’s gradual cementing of its strong position over the rest of the LLM makers. Its larger revenue pull despite higher token price indicates that the recent iterations of Claude and anticipation over the gradual release of Mythos 5 are giving the company a strong reputation - much like Apple. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Christian Cawley has extensive experience as a writer and editor in consumer electronics, IT and entertainment media. He has contributed to TechRadar since 2017 and has been published in Computer Weekly, Linux Format, ComputerActive, and other publications. He currently heads up the team at smart home website Matter Alpha, and writes about retro gaming at Gaming Retro. You must confirm your public display name before commenting Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.