Anthropic Beats OpenAI as 1 in 8 UK SMEs Now Pays for AI

Anthropic's quiet lead among UK small businesses

Anthropic's Claude has become the default AI tool for British SMEs, capturing 54.1% of all AI spending in the Capital on Tap dataset. OpenAI's ChatGPT sits at 27.3%.

That gap is wider than most people would guess. ChatGPT has the brand recognition, the mobile app, and the free tier that hooked millions of consumers. But among UK small businesses actually pulling out a credit card, Claude is winning by almost two to one.

The average quarterly spend per SME is £75.60. That's not a rounding error for a three-person firm, but it's also not enterprise software money. It buys a handful of seats on a Pro plan, or a modest API budget for a team experimenting with automation.

The provider mix also hints at what these businesses are doing. Perplexity, Replit, and Lovable all show up in the spending data, which suggests a meaningful chunk of the sample works in software development. Those are tools for research, coding, and shipping products, not just drafting emails.

The duplicate subscription problem nobody is talking about

More than 28% of UK SMEs using AI now pay for two or more platforms, and the research suggests many aren't doing it on purpose.

Capital on Tap's analysis points to a familiar pattern: a small business signs up for a trial, forgets to cancel, then adds another tool a few months later when a different one gets recommended. The result is overlapping subscriptions that nobody audits.

Damian Brychcy, CEO of Capital on Tap, put it bluntly: "More than a quarter of AI buyers now pay for two or more providers, and the balance between those providers can flip inside a single quarter." That volatility makes it hard for any provider to claim loyalty, and it makes budgeting harder for the businesses themselves.

"A three-person firm can now do its own research, marketing, bookkeeping and customer service to a standard that used to need a department," Brychcy added. That's the upside. The downside is that few SMEs have anyone on staff who can properly evaluate whether each tool is earning its keep.

Who's actually adopting AI fastest in the UK

Publishing leads at 26%, followed by radio and television, consulting, and telecoms.

The sector breakdown is more interesting than the headline number. Publishing at 26% makes sense when you consider how much of the job is drafting, editing, and repurposing text. Radio and TV at 21.6% is a bit more surprising until you remember how much scripting and research goes into even a short segment.

Consulting and telecoms round out the top four, both above 20%. These are industries where the output is words, analysis, or customer interaction, which is exactly where current AI tools are strongest.

What's missing from the top of the list are the sectors you'd expect to be slower: manufacturing, retail, hospitality. Those businesses have AI use cases too, but they tend to require integration work that a five-person firm can't easily justify.

What UK SMEs should actually do about it

Brychcy's advice boils down to three things: verify output, protect data, and keep humans in the loop for decisions that matter.

"Check its output, keep sensitive business and customer data out of tools you haven't vetted, and don't hand a model decisions that need a person's judgement," he said. That's basic hygiene, but the research suggests many SMEs aren't doing it.

The duplication problem is the easiest one to fix. A quarterly review of AI subscriptions, the same way you'd review any other software spend, would catch the forgotten trials and the overlapping tools. For a business spending £75.60 a quarter on average, that's a small effort with a real payoff.

The harder question is whether SMEs have the expertise to evaluate what they're buying. Most don't have dedicated IT staff, let alone someone who understands model limitations. That gap is where the next wave of AI incidents will come from, and it's worth watching whether providers do anything to close it.

What it means for you

If you run a small business in the US, UK, or EU, the Capital on Tap data is a useful benchmark. The £75.60 quarterly average is roughly $95 or €88 at current rates, which is a reasonable starting budget for a team of two or three people testing AI tools.

Anthropic and OpenAI both offer business plans with per-seat pricing, and both have free tiers that are good enough for evaluation. The catch is that free tiers often have data usage terms that aren't appropriate for customer information, so read those before you paste anything sensitive into a chat window.

The UK's small business AI market is still small in absolute terms, but the growth curve is steep and the provider mix is more competitive than the consumer market suggests. Anthropic's lead among SMEs is real, but it's also fragile. A single quarter can flip the balance, and most businesses paying for AI today haven't decided which tool they'll keep.