According to new data from Ramp’s AI Index — covering real transactions from over 50,000 US companies — DeepSeek leads the trending AI vendor category for June 2026, while Anthropic tops the fastest-growing category.
DeepSeek’s Comeback
DeepSeek launched DeepSeek V4 at the end of April 2026. While it doesn’t match the best Western models in total performance, it costs a fraction of the price — and the performance gap is far smaller than the price gap. US companies are increasingly turning to DeepSeek for cost-sensitive AI workloads.
The Bigger Picture: Chinese Models Rising
A December 2025 report showed that Chinese models like DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen passed US rivals in Hugging Face downloads for the first time, accounting for over 44% of all downloads of popular new models. That trend has accelerated into 2026.
OpenAI Still Leads, But Gap is Narrowing
Western AI labs still lead by a wide margin in enterprise adoption overall, but the cost-performance story is driving real adoption shifts. Anthropic’s growth rate being the fastest signals strong enterprise confidence in Claude — but the pressure from low-cost Chinese models is intensifying.
What Businesses Are Watching
- DeepSeek V4 — trending #1 for cost efficiency
- Anthropic / Claude — fastest growing enterprise adoption
- OpenAI — still dominant, but losing market share
- Design tools (Figma, Paper) — still in demand despite AI writing tools