Ramp says AI token spend barely grew in August and September

Businesses on Ramp sent more work to AI models while paying about the same, which its economist puts down to the price war between labs.

By Alexandre S. 7 Nov 2026, 03:40 UTC

On the books of Ramp, a business spending platform, the AI bill has almost stopped growing while the work sent to models keeps climbing. Token spend, the metered bill for model use, jumped 42% in July and then added just 1.5% over the next two months, TechCrunch reported on 6 November 2026 from Ramp’s spend data. The volume of tokens, the units that work is metered in, went on climbing through both months.

Ramp’s lead economist, Ara Kharazian, blames price and calls it a buyer’s market. Anthropic says in a filing that its cuts to Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 took about $600 million off revenue growth, and OpenAI halved API rates, what developers pay per use, for two GPT-6 models in September. His October letter, going on what businesses told him, puts customers in the stronger position on enterprise contracts and says labs are willing to discount from list price.

One in a hundred firms accounts for 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic spend, on Ramp’s numbers. Their September bill of $9,568 per employee a month sat 3.1% below the July peak. At the median firm, the monthly bill is $12 to $15 per employee. In September, 55.9% of Ramp’s businesses paid for AI. Anthropic had 43.8% and OpenAI 40.6%. Token spend then recovered by 8.9% in the month to 23 October.

Our price sheet shows why that median matters. Claude Pro is $20 a month and Google AI Pro $19.99, our 6 November check.

At $12 to $15, the median firm’s AI spend per head sits below one Claude Pro or Google AI Pro seat on our sheet.

Ramp says AI token spend barely grew in August and September

Sources

More AI news from 7 November 2026