# Walmart Payment Shift and AI Market Volatility

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-08-22

## Transcript

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According to new data, OpenAI is gaining on Anthropic.
I'm Imran Shaikh and your Weekend Crunch, featuring three big tech headlines, starts right now.
Alright folks, apparently, hell has frozen over.
Yeah, that's right, Walmart on Friday said it'll finally accept payments via both Apple Pay and Google Pay at its stores, including Walmart and Sam's Club.
The retail giant says that beginning August 24th, it'll begin adding tap-to-pay to its payment options, its select Walmart stores and Sam's Club locations.
It expects the feature to reach all stores and clubs by the end of the year and will then roll it out to all its fuel stations by the middle of 2027.
The news is a surprise as Walmart has long refused to adopt the ubiquitous payment technology to instead promote its own in-house solutions like Walmart Pay and Scan&Go.
Heck, in years past, Walmart even teamed up with other big retailers in an attempt to take down Apple Pay entirely with an alternative mobile payment system of their own called Current C.
Well, that effort failed and was shut down back in 2016.
All the while, Walmart customers have begged the company to support modern tap-and-pay technology like Apple Pay, which is now accepted at 85% of retailers across the U.S., including most larger stores.
For Walmart, the decision reads as a defeat.
As one of the world's largest retailers, it believed it could push customers to its own payment solutions despite the growing adoption of Apple Pay and others of its kind.
Ultimately, though, it had to admit that it was disadvantaging its own customers in the process.
Of course, the company is trying to spin the news as giving consumers more choice.
Tap to Pay is a great addition to the other payment options already offered like cash, credit card, or Walmart Pay, the company's announcement stated, continuing, and giving customers and members more choice at checkout is part of a broader effort to make managing and using their money easier.
Sure, Walmart, whatever.
A proposed class-action lawsuit is accusing smart ringmaker Aura of deceiving consumers about the accuracy of its sleep-tracking features.
You see, the lawsuit filed on Thursday by Clarkson Law Firm in San Francisco alleges that aura rings are unable to measure any of the physiological signals needed to assess sleep quality or determine sleep stages, and that they instead rely on AI-generated estimates that have a coin flips chance of being correct, according to the complaint.
Now, the lawsuit follows years of Aura users taking to the internet to share their frustration with the Smart Ring's sleep accuracy, with some saying they felt they slept poorly but were told their sleep had been optimal.
Well, some have also expressed doubts about the device's ability to monitor and detect sleep cycles.
Despite this, the complaint alleges that Aura marketed its ring as being built for accuracy and offering unparalleled accuracy.
It says Aura told customers that smart rings could achieve 79% accuracy in their measurements and more recently claimed that the rings offered 95% sleep staging accuracy compared with clinical sleep labs.
The complaint goes on to allege that Aura cannot measure sleep or cycles because sleep happens in the brain, not on one's finger.
Aura did not immediately respond to TechCrunch's request for comment.
The complaint calls on Aura to stop deceiving consumers by falsely advertising its wearables as having capabilities they don't deliver.
Until both OpenAI and Anthropic get close enough to their planned IPOs to release their financials, We have to look to other sources for signs of how well their businesses are doing.
One of those sources, Ramp, the corporate credit card and expense management company, has just released some surprising new data.
OpenAI has started gaining on Anthropic with U.S.
businesses.
You see, OpenAI, which was once the runaway leader with both businesses and consumers, lost the lead among ramps-paying business users back in May.
That's when Anthropic hit 41% market share to OpenAI's 39%.
The chat GPT maker has never regained that lead.
As of July, Anthropic has nearly 44% to OpenAI's nearly 40%.
The data covers more than 70,000 American businesses that spend billions via ramps, bill pay, and corporate card products.
Ramp's customers are spread across industries, but as a popular Silicon Valley corporate credit card, they do skew toward the tech industry.
A closer look at the most recent data, according to Ramp economist Ara Karazian, shows that OpenAI is currently growing faster among this segment in Q3 to date than Anthropic.
Mind you, there's still a month left in the quarter, and that's like 30 in AI years, so the trend could easily shift again before it's over.
Ramp also declined to provide actual dollars spent, sharing only percentages.
To borrow ChatGPT's own hedging style for a moment here, this isn't a measure of the total market.
It excludes large enterprises that use spend management tools from providers like American Express rather than Ramp.
But, you know, it's enough data to show market indications.
shows is that Anthropic hasn't won permanently.
Businesses are willing to flop back and forth as each lab releases new models.
Volatility that should give both companies' investors pause about how sticky enterprise AI spending really is.
Ramp's data also suggests that both companies should be growing business revenue even as they do get out for market share because the market overall is expanding.
The percentage of companies that pay for AI among these Ramp customers has been steadily climbing.
It topped 50% in March.
It reached nearly 56% by July.
And folks, that's your Daily Crunch.
Today's stories were reported by Sarah Perez, Aisha Malik, Julie Board, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.
We'll see you here next week.
And until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.
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