VentureBeat survey: twice as many companies use OpenAI's agent platform as Anthropic's

Twice as many companies use OpenAI's agent orchestration platform as Anthropic's, according to VentureBeat Intelligence's September survey on agent orchestration. The lead comes even as Anthropic may be ahead on other indicators: Ramp, the corporate card and spending company, reports that more businesses now pay for Anthropic than for OpenAI.

An agent orchestration platform is the software layer that hands tasks to AI agents, calls tools, and keeps agents within their permissions. Among companies using one, 43% said they use OpenAI's, 22% said they use Anthropic's, and 21% said they use Google's.

The survey named the products: OpenAI's Agents SDK and Responses API, Anthropic's Claude Agent SDK and Managed Agents, and Google's Enterprise Agent Platform.

Asked for their primary platform, 25% named OpenAI's, 18% named Google's, and 16% named Anthropic's. The rest named platforms such as Salesforce's Agentforce, Microsoft's Copilot Studio, Amazon Bedrock, and open-source frameworks such as LangChain.

A second September survey on AI infrastructure and compute asked which cloud and model providers companies use in production. For cloud, 51% use Google Cloud, 36% Microsoft Azure and 23% Amazon Web Services; for models, 41% use OpenAI's, 39% Google's Gemini and 15% Anthropic's.

On main production provider, 32% named Google Cloud or Gemini, 22% named OpenAI, and just 6% named Anthropic. VentureBeat notes that some companies running OpenAI models through Azure, or Claude through AWS or Google Cloud, may have named those clouds instead.

The research also measured the cost of swapping models: 62% of companies had replaced the model inside a production app in the past year while keeping the surrounding app. Among them, 59% saw performance drop and had to rework the app or go back to the original model, and only 19% said the swap took almost no engineering work, while 75% spent a few days or more, or stopped before finishing.

In a third survey on agentic context layers, 58% of companies running retrieval in production use OpenAI's retrieval and 50% use Google's Vertex AI Search, versus 12% to 14% each for the most-used standalone tools, Pinecone and Elasticsearch. VentureBeat will repeat the questions in its October survey to see whether OpenAI's orchestration lead shows up again, and cautions that the results describe specific respondents and may not hold for all companies.