Ramp's latest corporate data revealed that token spending expanded by only 1.5% across August and September, plummeting from July's 42% growth rate before rebounding modestly by 8.9% in late October. The decelerating spend stems largely from aggressive price slashes, including OpenAI halving API costs and Anthropic cutting prices on flagship models, which dented revenue growth by about $600 million. Spending also remains heavily skewed toward a small fraction of tech firms, raising questions about whether broader enterprise sectors will ever match that investment scale.
Key points
Widespread discounting and open-source competition are decoupling high AI usage growth fr…: Widespread discounting and open-source competition are decoupling high AI usage growth from corporate token revenues.
Top-tier AI monetization remains heavily concentrated in venture-backed tech startups rat…: Top-tier AI monetization remains heavily concentrated in venture-backed tech startups rather than traditional commercial industries.
Market price wars threaten provider revenues at a critical moment when major model builde…: Market price wars threaten provider revenues at a critical moment when major model builders are eyeing public market valuations.
Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1
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.
“Almost the entire spend on AI is from venture-backed, high-growth tech companies,” Ramp’s lead economist Ara Kharazian told TechCrunch. “That’s fine as long as AI spend continues to rise, but if it starts to slow down because of something in the market or some other factor, they will all start to slow down simultaneously, and that could lead to other cascading effects.”
Kharazian said he’s already seeing evidence that the top 1% of firms — the most “AI-pilled” — have stuttered slightly in their spend…
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