Companies are using more AI than ever, but they’re not spending more on it. A new report from Ramp shows AI spending flatlined over late summer even as token volumes rose, a sign that price competition and savvier customers may be capping revenue for OpenAI and Anthropic. According to Ramp’s data, token spend only grew 1.5% across August and September.
To compare, in July, it grew 42% from the previous month. As Anthropic gears up for its IPO, the data suggests investors might be wrong to assume AI companies will keep growing at breakneck speed. A slowdown among that cohort is “sufficient to slow down revenue entirely, despite the fact that we’re seeing rising volumes,” he said.
Ramp data shows growth in spending among median and top 10%, but it’s not enough to make up the difference. Median firms spend $12-$15 per employee per month, and the top 10% spend $600-$1,000. While there’s plenty of demand for AI coding agents in industries like software and finance, “it’s not necessarily true that a doctor’s office or a car dealership will need to spend that much on AI.” “The era of hypergrowth may be over, and now that we know there may not be as much juice to squeeze out of the top 1%,” he continued.
October data did see a re-acceleration, with token spend up 8.9% from September 23 to October 23, but Khazarian said the headwinds on spend growth are strong. Khazarian (who has published a series of blogs called “Cracks in the AI Thesis”) said the slowdown isn’t due to a demand problem. Again, AI volumes are up.
Instead he points to the competitive nature of the marketplace. In September, OpenAI cut API prices in half for GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna. Answering the price war, Anthropic has also made significant reductions to pricing for Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 — a decision that the company said in a recent filing slashed revenue growth by about $600 million.
Both companies have also been offering enterprise discounts that are intended to lock-in spend, but in reality are hitting their revenue targets. Khazarian said this dynamic means it has very much become a buyer’s market. Subsidizing use of expensive technology in order to lock in customers has always been a part of the Big Tech playbook.
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