Ramp: Enterprise AI Spend Grew 1.5% as Anthropic Nears IPO

Ramp's November card data shows U.S. enterprise AI token spend grew just 1.5% across August and September combined, a sharp deceleration from the 42% growth clocked in July, TechCrunch reported. October reaccelerated, but only to 8.9% from September 23 to October 23, still a fraction of the summer pace.

Median firms are spending $12 to $15 per employee per month on AI, and the top 10% $600 to $1,000, per the same data. The top 1% of firms, which peaked near $10,000 per employee at the summer high, dipped slightly in August and September.

"A lot of the assumptions that we had about the trajectory of AI spend are starting to break down," Ramp's lead economist Ara Kharazian said. He attributed the deceleration partly to pricing pressure ("OpenAI and Anthropic price cuts have…just made it cheaper to use AI") and partly to buyers getting better at cost control. "As you get really advanced in using AI, you get better at figuring out how to control it," Kharazian said, adding that "it has very much become a buyer's market."

The timing lands awkwardly for Anthropic, whose indicated IPO valuation has already sunk from the $2 trillion estimated in early October to $1.2 to $1.3 trillion. OpenAI similarly lowered its proposed valuation to $1.25 trillion from $1.4 trillion, part of a broader re-rating AI Weekly has been tracking across its Anthropic coverage. Anthropic itself disclosed in a recent filing that price reductions for Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 slashed revenue growth by about $600 million.

"The era of hypergrowth may be over," Kharazian said.