OpenAI’s vice‑like hold on the banking sector is slipping, according to the latest figures from the Evident AI Index, with the frontier AI firm increasingly being dropped as a first‑choice vendor.

By the end of 2025, Evident’s Use Case Tracker found that the number of banking applications powered by OpenAI had fallen to around one‑third, down from more than half just eighteen months earlier.

Though not exactly a fall from grace (the ChatGPT creator is still the primary vendor for more than 30% of the banking sector’s AI as of Q4’25), Evident suggests OpenAI’s mighty influence is ebbing as banks look to diversify their AI stacks 

That impulse has seen partnerships emerge between the likes of HSBC and French startup Mistral AI, to BNY pairing Google’s Gemini with its Eliza AI platform, and Google Cloud inking deals with both Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo to weave AI and agentic workflows into their core operations.

Anthropic, meanwhile, has gone further than most of its rivals, including OpenAI, to position its Claude family as the AI of choice for professional and financial services.

Last year, the firm released its “Claude for Excel” plugin that gave access to real-time market data and portfolio analytics, and has just released a similar Legal Plugin that can handle contract reviewing, compliance workflows, and in-house legal briefings

Added to that, Anthropic has taken a commanding lead when it comes to coding, with recent figures from Menlo Ventures claiming that the firm has taken 54% of the enterprise coding market, up from 42% six months ago, while OpenAI is trailing at 21%.

Evident said that in conversations with bankers, the same message was repeated: “OpenAI isn’t the only lab building what enterprises actually need right now.”

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The benchmarking firm noted that these defections are going beyond banking, with OpenAI’s share of enterprise workloads in general falling from 50% in 2023 to 27% last year, the inverse trajectory of Anthropic, which climbed from 24% to 40%.

It’s not just in business, either, with OpenAI’s crown slipping in the general-purpose chatbot race, too, where recent figures show it is fast losing ground to Google following the launch of the most recent Gemini model. 

Still, for now, OpenAI remains the biggest, best-known, most utilised AI firm, but the developing trend is testing the company’s theory that “growth does not move in a perfectly smooth line.”