Top AI spenders cut costs 9.7% in August, Ramp AI Index shows

Ramp has tracked monthly US business spending on AI services through its AI Index, and the September 2026 edition lands at a moment when the top spenders — the firms that drive most enterprise revenue for model providers — are pulling back. Adoption is still rising but at a slower pace: in August, 43.8 percent of US companies paid for Anthropic services, up 0.34 percentage points, while OpenAI gained 0.09 points to 39.8 percent. IT and finance sectors continue to lead.

The cutback among the largest spenders coincides with two other forces Ramp identifies: falling token prices and a steady migration to cheaper models. The effective price per million tokens has dropped 41 percent since its March 2026 peak to $0.68, and frontier models like Opus, Fable, and Sol saw their share of consumed tokens fall from 53 percent in early August to 45 percent by early September, as cheaper standard models such as GPT-5.6 Terra and Claude's Sonnet series picked up volume. Ramp chief economist Ara Kharazian attributes part of the August drop to seasonality, but also points to internal company policies restricting expensive frontier models. Open-weight or Chinese alternatives are not driving the shift: only 6.4 percent of AI-using companies on Ramp's platform run open-weight models, dropping to 3.6 percent across all companies.

Kharazian last month flagged what he called "Cracks in the AI Thesis," citing weak Fable 5 adoption and the shift to cheaper models as warning signs for providers. The key question is whether usage volume grows fast enough to offset the price decline — Kharazian suggests it may not. Ramp's data covers only a slice of the market, and things may get clearer when Anthropic files for its IPO, reportedly planned for October.