CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Thursday that rising bond yields, higher oil prices and concerns about the U.S. consumer are making it increasingly difficult for investors to reward companies with strong underlying businesses, creating what he described as an “incredibly jarring gulf between stock prices and reality.”

Cramer’s comments came after another difficult session for Wall Street, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling 1.3%, the S&P 500 declining nearly 0.9% and the Nasdaq Composite losing 1%.

The selloff reflected growing concerns that higher energy prices, driven by the conflict involving Iran, could keep inflation elevated and limit the Federal Reserve’s ability to ease monetary policy. Treasury yields also moved higher, reversing much of the decline that followed the Treasury Department’s announcement Wednesday of a plan to bring down longer-term borrowing costs.

The 30-year Treasury yield had climbed above 5.33% earlier in the week, reaching a level not seen in nearly two decades.

Cramer argued that the market environment is forcing investors to evaluate individual companies through a much broader macroeconomic lens, even when their businesses continue to perform well.

“There’s an incredibly jarring gulf between stock prices and reality,” Cramer said on “Mad Money.”

He made the comments from the construction site of Micron Technology’s massive semiconductor fabrication complex in Boise, Idaho, where thousands of workers are building facilities that will eventually manufacture memory chips used in artificial intelligence systems.

The project, Cramer said, illustrates the scale of investment taking place in U.S. manufacturing and AI infrastructure at a time when financial markets are increasingly focused on economic risks.

“Unfortunately, though, you can’t take your eye off the broader market even if you think, as I do, that Micron’s stock is radically undervalued,” he said. “In the end, we always have to look at stocks through the market’s prism.”

Micron shares rose about 4% Thursday, even though the stock remains roughly 20% below its June record high. Cramer’s Charitable Trust, the portfolio associated with CNBC’s Investing Club, owns Micron shares.

The performance stood in contrast to the broader market, where concerns about consumers, energy costs, and interest rates continued to dominate trading.

Walmart provided one of the clearest examples of how those pressures can affect a major company. Shares of the retail giant plunged about 9% Thursday after the company reported quarterly comparable sales below Wall Street expectations and issued sales guidance that also disappointed investors.

Cramer said the results were more complicated than the headline figures suggested. Walmart has continued to emphasize low prices and market-share gains rather than maximizing short-term profit, while higher gasoline prices have reduced the amount of money consumers have available for other purchases.

Gasoline prices above $4 a gallon could place additional pressure on household budgets, particularly if elevated oil prices persist as the conflict involving Iran continues. That creates a difficult backdrop for retailers and other consumer-facing businesses because higher fuel costs can simultaneously increase operating expenses and reduce consumers’ discretionary spending.

“Two-thirds of this country’s economy is service-based,” Cramer said, explaining that the strength of the American consumer remains more important to the broader economy than the manufacturing investment taking place at projects such as Micron’s Idaho facility.

The bond market represents another challenge.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC Thursday that the Treasury’s planned purchases of longer-dated government debt could exceed the $4 billion upper limit discussed the previous day.

The proposed purchases are intended to help put downward pressure on longer-term Treasury yields, but Cramer questioned whether the intervention would be large enough to make a meaningful difference given the size of the U.S. government’s debt.

“When America has $40 trillion in debt, a $4 billion buyback has the Treasury Secretary looking like the Little Dutch boy with his finger plugging the dike,” Cramer said.

The comparison underscores the scale mismatch between the Treasury’s proposed intervention and the broader forces influencing the bond market. Investors are weighing government borrowing needs, inflation, monetary policy and geopolitical risks, all of which can exert upward pressure on long-term yields.

Higher yields have much bearing for equities because they increase the return investors can obtain from relatively lower-risk government securities while also raising the discount rate applied to future corporate earnings. That can place disproportionate pressure on growth and technology stocks whose valuations depend heavily on profits expected years into the future.

Cramer said Micron’s performance demonstrates the difficulty of separating individual corporate fundamentals from broader market sentiment. The company is benefiting from substantial investment in AI infrastructure and from efforts to expand U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, yet its valuation remains affected by changes in interest rates and overall risk appetite.

“Micron’s stock finished up 4%. That’s terrific American exceptionalism at work,” Cramer said. “The problem is there are another 499 stocks in the S&P 500 and the prism made a lot of them look downright awful today.”

This points to a growing divide within the U.S. stock market. Companies tied to AI, semiconductor manufacturing, and other areas of strategic investment can continue to experience strong underlying demand, while their shares remain vulnerable to macroeconomic shocks.

OpenAI is regaining ground on Anthropic among U.S. businesses, new data from corporate spending platform Ramp shows, offering an early indication that competition between the two leading AI companies is becoming increasingly fluid as enterprises experiment with competing models.

Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has publicly disclosed the detailed financial information investors will eventually expect to see as the companies move closer to potential initial public offerings. In the meantime, corporate spending data can provide an imperfect but useful window into how businesses are allocating money across AI providers.

Ramp, which provides corporate cards, bill payment and expense management services, tracks spending patterns across more than 70,000 U.S. businesses. Its customers range across industries, although the company’s concentration in technology startups and other venture-backed companies means the data is not representative of the entire American corporate economy.

The latest figures show Anthropic maintaining its lead among Ramp’s paying business customers, but OpenAI is beginning to close the gap.

Anthropic accounted for nearly 44% of spending among the two companies in July, compared with nearly 40% for OpenAI, according to Ramp. The figures measure the share of Ramp’s business customers paying for products from the two AI companies, rather than total revenue or the amount of money spent.

The shift began in May, when Anthropic overtook OpenAI for the first time among Ramp’s paying business users. Anthropic reached 41% at the time, compared with OpenAI’s 39%.

OpenAI has not reclaimed the top position since then. But Ramp economist Ara Kharazian said OpenAI was growing faster among the segment during the third quarter so far, suggesting the gap could narrow again.

“GPT-5.6 Sol is really good, increasingly the choice for developers,” Kharazian said in a post on X, attributing part of OpenAI’s recent momentum to its latest model.

The data provides a useful counterpoint to the idea that Anthropic has established a durable lead in enterprise AI. Anthropic’s rise among businesses has been one of the most closely watched developments in the AI market. Its Claude models have developed a strong following among software developers and companies seeking AI systems for coding, research, and other professional applications.

OpenAI, meanwhile, has historically benefited from ChatGPT’s enormous consumer user base and broad enterprise adoption. The company’s challenge has been converting that early lead into sustained business spending as rivals improve their models and target specific professional workflows.

Ramp’s numbers suggest that enterprise customers remain willing to switch between providers as new models emerge. That creates an important question for investors: how “sticky” is enterprise AI spending?

Traditional enterprise software tends to become deeply embedded in company workflows, creating switching costs that can make customers reluctant to move to competing products. AI may prove different because companies can test several models simultaneously, route different tasks to different systems, and change providers when a new model offers better performance, lower prices, or more favorable terms.

The result could be a more volatile enterprise software market in which model releases have a direct and immediate impact on corporate purchasing decisions.

Anthropic’s lead also needs to be interpreted carefully. Ramp does not disclose the actual dollar value of spending represented by the percentages, and its dataset excludes companies that use competing corporate-spending platforms, including large businesses that manage expenses through providers such as American Express.

That makes Ramp’s figures an indicator of market direction rather than a comprehensive measure of OpenAI or Anthropic’s enterprise revenue.

The composition of Ramp’s customer base also matters. Its concentration among technology companies and startups could make its customers more likely than the broader corporate market to experiment with multiple AI models, adopt new developer tools, and rapidly shift spending following major model launches.

Even with those limitations, the data points to a broader trend that could be more important than the competition between OpenAI and Anthropic themselves: corporate adoption of paid AI services is continuing to expand.

Among Ramp’s customers, the percentage of businesses paying for AI products rose to nearly 56% in July, from more than 50% in March. That means OpenAI and Anthropic can both increase their business revenue even while competing for the same customers and losing relative market share to each other.

Market-share gains do not necessarily mean one company is taking revenue directly from another. If the number of businesses purchasing AI products continues to rise, both providers can expand rapidly while their relative positions fluctuate.

The model race is making that competition even more dynamic.

Companies are now evaluating AI systems based on coding performance, reasoning ability, agentic capabilities, price, latency, security, data controls, and integration with existing software. A model that wins on one of those dimensions can gain adoption quickly, while a rival can recover ground with its next release.

Anthropic’s Fable 5, according to Kharazian, had weaker adoption in Ramp’s data, which he attributed partly to its pricing and regulatory-related data-retention requirements. Anthropic has faced user concerns over its policy requiring Fable users to retain data for 30 days in certain circumstances.

Still, attributing changes in market share to a single model release would be premature. Enterprise purchasing decisions are influenced by a combination of model performance, pricing, procurement policies, security requirements, existing contracts, and how easily a system can be incorporated into a company’s workflows.

The larger takeaway is that the U.S. enterprise AI market is entering a more competitive phase.

The first stage of generative AI adoption was dominated by experimentation, with companies testing ChatGPT and competing systems to determine where the technology could create value. The market is now moving toward a phase in which businesses are paying for AI at scale and evaluating competing models more systematically.

Ramp’s data indicates that this transition is benefiting the market as a whole. More than half of the company’s tracked businesses now pay for AI, and that proportion continues to rise. That expansion could matter for OpenAI and Anthropic as both companies approach a stage where investors will demand greater visibility into their financial performance.

U.S. stock futures came under renewed pressure on Thursday as investors assessed rising oil prices, higher Treasury yields and escalating tensions between Washington and Tehran, adding to concerns about inflation and the outlook for interest rates.

The latest market moves came after U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to impose what he called unprecedented “economic warfare” on Iran and threatened severe financial penalties against countries that continue to support Tehran.

The escalation has added a fresh source of uncertainty for markets already unsettled by a sharp technology-led selloff earlier in the week and a surge in global government bond yields. U.S. stocks ultimately fell sharply on Thursday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropping 1.3%, the S&P 500 losing 0.9% and the Nasdaq Composite declining 1%.

Oil prices were among the clearest signs of the geopolitical risk. Brent crude futures, the international benchmark, rose 1.59% to $93.08 a barrel as of 4:19 a.m. ET, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures for September delivery gained 1.63% to $87.23.

The gains followed Trump’s warning that Washington would launch what he described as the “MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY” against Iran.

Trump said Iran had been given an opportunity to reach a deal but had failed to take it. He also threatened “TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences” against countries providing Tehran with a lifeline, including through cash transfers, currency swaps and shipping registries.

The threat reverberated through oil markets because the confrontation is unfolding around the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important energy corridors. Any sustained disruption to shipping through the waterway tightens global crude supplies and pushes energy prices higher. Brent ultimately settled Thursday at $93.78 a barrel, while WTI settled at $87.83, with both benchmarks reaching their highest levels since July 24.

The United Arab Emirates added to concerns about the widening economic fallout when it said on Wednesday that it was suspending trade and financial transactions with Iran after saying it had come under fire from the Islamic Republic on Tuesday. The move could further complicate regional trade and financial flows at a time when shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains severely disrupted.

For investors, the immediate concern is that higher oil prices could feed back into inflation. A prolonged rise in energy costs would make it harder for central banks to ease monetary policy and could force markets to price higher interest rates for longer.

U.S. technology stocks could be significantly impacted by the risk. The sector has led much of this year’s equity rally, supported by enormous spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure, but technology and other growth stocks are sensitive to rising bond yields because their valuations depend heavily on expectations for future earnings.

The bond market has already become a major source of pressure. The 30-year U.S. Treasury yield climbed back above 5.2% on Thursday after falling sharply in the previous session, while the 10-year yield moved back toward 4.7%. The earlier decline in long-term yields had been helped by the U.S. Treasury’s decision to increase purchases of longer-dated government debt, but that relief proved temporary.

The simultaneous rise in oil prices and bond yields creates a difficult environment for equities. Higher oil prices increase inflation risks, while higher Treasury yields raise the discount rate used to value future corporate earnings. Together, they can pressure both corporate margins and stock valuations.

The pressure is acute for the technology sector after semiconductor stocks suffered a major selloff earlier in the week. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell nearly 5% on Tuesday, ending a powerful run fueled by expectations that artificial intelligence demand would continue to drive spending on chips and data centers.

The selloff also raises questions about whether the market’s heavy concentration in AI-related companies has left investors vulnerable to shifts in interest rates. Strong earnings from technology companies and AI hyperscalers helped push the S&P 500 and Dow to record highs earlier this month, but investors have become increasingly focused on whether the enormous capital expenditure associated with AI will generate sufficiently strong returns.

The geopolitical shock is therefore arriving at an already sensitive point for U.S. equities. The market is no longer dealing with a single risk. Investors are simultaneously assessing the sustainability of AI valuations, the direction of inflation, the trajectory of Treasury yields, the U.S. government’s expanding debt burden and the possibility that the Iran conflict could keep energy prices elevated.

The Federal Reserve’s policy outlook has consequently become more difficult to assess. Traders had already reduced expectations for a rate cut in the near term after recent inflation data, while market pricing indicated at least one 25-basis-point rate hike by the end of 2026. A sustained oil-price shock could reinforce the argument for keeping monetary policy restrictive if it begins to feed into broader consumer prices.

The effect could extend beyond Wall Street. Higher oil prices raise transportation and production costs globally, while higher U.S. Treasury yields tend to tighten financial conditions internationally and increase the cost of dollar-denominated borrowing for governments and companies.

The developments also introduce a new risk for the global economy through the energy supply chain. Iran is a major oil producer, while the Strait of Hormuz is strategically important to global energy shipments. A prolonged confrontation that restricts traffic through the waterway could create a combination of higher energy prices and weaker economic growth, a difficult scenario for central banks.