Top AI-Spending Companies Cut Per-Employee Costs Nearly 10% in August

Summary

Ramp’s September 2026 AI Index says AI adoption among US companies continued to grow in August, but at a slower pace, while spending patterns changed among the heaviest users. Anthropic was used by 43.8% of US companies on the platform, up 0.34 percentage points, and OpenAI by 39.8%, up 0.09 points; IT and financial services remained the leading adopting sectors. Median AI spending per employee among the top 1% of companies fell 9.7% month over month to $7,205. Ramp says this group is small, making the estimate more volatile and subject to later revision. Some of the decline may reflect August vacations among engineers, but falling token prices and a shift toward cheaper models also reduced costs. The effective price per million tokens fell 41% from its March 2026 peak to $0.68, while usage volume did not increase quickly enough to offset the decline. Most volume growth came from standard models such as GPT-5.6 Terra and Claude’s Sonnet series. The token share of frontier models including Opus, Fable, and Sol dropped from 53% in early August to 45% in early September as companies increasingly treated standard models as sufficient and introduced policies limiting expensive model use. The move toward lower-cost models was not driven by open-weight or Chinese alternatives: only 6.4% of AI-using companies on Ramp ran open-weight models, falling to 3.6% across all companies. Ramp cautions that its data covers only part of the market; the report says more clarity may come if Anthropic files for a reportedly planned October IPO.