Ramp data shows AI spending stalling just as Anthropic nears its IPO

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 in August and September, coming up just below the $10,000 per-employee they were hitting at their summer peaks. 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. 

“If you look at the use cases today, it’s not necessarily clear they will get up to that $10,000 per employee per month mark that the 1% is at,” Khazarian said. 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.