Claude’s next enterprise battle is not models: it’s the agent control plane
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
New VB Pulse data shows Microsoft and Open AI leading enterprise agent orchestration, but Anthropic’s first measurable foothold points to a larger fight over who controls the infrastructure where AI agents run.For the last two years, the enterprise AI race has mostly been framed as a model war: Open AI’s GPT series versus Anthropic’s Claude versus Google’s Gemini, with smaller and open-source alternatives also coming in from the U.S. and China. But the next strategic fight may not be over which model answers a prompt best. It may be over who controls the layer where agents plan, call tools, access data, run workflows and prove to security teams that they did not do anything they were not supposed to do.New VB Pulse survey data suggests the category is already taking shape. Our independent Enterprise Agentic Orchestration tracker, a survey that records the preferences of qualified, verified technical-decision maker respondents at enterprises at regular intervals, found that Microsoft Copilot Studio and Azure AI Studio led with 38.6% primary-platform adoption in February, up from 35.7% in January. OpenAI’s Assistants and Responses API held second place, rising from 23.2% to 25.7%. Anthropic remained far smaller, but it made its first appearance in the tracker: moving from 0% in January to 5.7% in February for Anthropic tool use and workflows. The underlying move is small — four respondents out of a total 70 in this cohort, with more to come — but strategically interesting because it marks the first sign in this tracker of Claude usage moving from the model layer into native orchestration.That distinction matters. Enterprises are not merely choosing chatbots. They are deciding where the live operational machinery of AI work will sit: inside Microsoft’s stack, inside OpenAI’s API layer, inside Anthropic’s managed runtime, inside an open framework, or across a hybrid mix of all of them.“This is the convergence moment for enterprise AI,” said Tom Findling, CEO and cofounder