Businesses use more AI but pay less for it, Ramp AI Index shows

US businesses are using more AI than ever while paying less for it, according to the latest Ramp AI Index from Ramp economist Ara Kharazian. Usage climbed about 50 percent since spending peaked in July and hit a record high at the end of September, even as overall spending keeps declining.

Cheaper models, tougher competition

Kharazian attributes the decline to price cuts on top models and to the arrival of cheaper, more efficient standard and lite models. According to his analysis, the drop comes almost entirely from competition between OpenAI and Anthropic, the two labs behind nearly all business token spending in the data.

In the last week of September covered by the data, Anthropic took 51 percent of token spending and OpenAI took 44.5 percent. Open-source models, despite growing attention, still make up less than five percent of business spending.

What the index measures

The Ramp AI Index tracks transaction data from more than 70,000 US companies, while its token-level figures come from a subsample of that group. Kharazian notes two caveats: the analysis covers only API spending, and it skews toward large AI customers. The index is therefore a view of how corporate AI budgets are allocated rather than the entire market, but it remains one of the broadest pictures available of the money actually flowing to AI vendors.

Why the trend matters

This is not the first decline recorded by the index, but it has lasted unusually long, with the peak coming in July. The pattern suggests the drop comes from falling prices rather than falling demand: businesses keep adopting the technology even as the cost per unit of usage falls. For vendors, that means growing usage no longer guarantees revenue growth at the same pace.