# AI spending flatlines despite rising token volumes as price wars and thriftier customers undercut revenue growth > AI token spending grew only 1.5% across August and September, a sharp drop from July's 42% jump. Price cuts from OpenAI and Anthropic, including a roughly $600 million revenue hit for Anthropic, are capping revenue even as usage rises. - Type: AI news - Page: https://completeaitraining.com/news/ai-spending-flatlines-despite-rising-token-volumes-as-price/ - Published: 2026-11-07 - Updated: 2026-11-07 - Author: Jeroen Erne - Jobs: Creatives, Executives and strategy, Finance, Human resources, Management, Marketing, PR and communications, Sales - Reading time: 3 min AI usage is climbing across companies, but spending has hit a plateau. New transaction data from Ramp shows that token spend grew only 1.5% across August and September, a sharp deceleration from July's 42% month-over-month jump. The flattening curve signals that price competition and smarter buying are capping revenue for major model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic, even as their IPO ambitions intensify. "Almost the entire spend on AI is from venture-backed, high-growth tech companies," said Ara Kharazian, Ramp's lead economist. "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." #### The top 1% of spenders are pulling back Kharazian pointed to a stall among the most aggressive adopters. The top 1% of firms - those he describes as the most "AI-pilled" - dipped just below the $10,000 per-employee monthly spend they reached at their summer peak. That cohort alone, he said, is "sufficient to slow down revenue entirely, despite the fact that we're seeing rising volumes." Growth in spending among median and top 10% firms continues, but not enough to offset the drag. Median companies spend $12 to $15 per employee per month on AI. The top 10% spend $600 to $1,000. The gap between those tiers and the top 1% raises questions about whether broad adoption will ever reach the same intensity. "It's not necessarily true that a doctor's office or a car dealership will need to spend that much on AI," Kharazian said. #### Price wars are reshaping the revenue picture The slowdown isn't about demand. Token volumes are up. What changed is cost. OpenAI cut API prices in half for GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna in September. Anthropic responded with significant reductions for Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 - a move the company disclosed slashed revenue growth by roughly $600 million. Both companies have also offered enterprise discounts designed to lock in spend, but those deals have eaten into top-line targets. "OpenAI and Anthropic price cuts have just made it cheaper to use AI," Kharazian said. He described a buyer's market where competition from Meta, Nvidia, and open model companies in China and the U.S. keeps pressure on pricing. A lightweight tool called Jev, which routes simple tasks to predetermined outputs, is also gaining traction on Ramp's platform. "For a lot of AI use cases, you just need a simple Yes/No," Kharazian said. "So you take your already cheap models, you shift them over to Jev, and now your already cheap stuff gets even cheaper." #### Companies are getting thriftier with the tech Beyond price cuts, organizations are learning to control costs. Advanced users set defaults that block expensive models from running long tasks, impose employee budgets, and route workloads to lighter, cheaper models. Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari recently posted internal data matching Ramp's findings, summing up the dynamic: "tokens go brrr. costs go ahhh." "You can use more AI, but use it for less," Kharazian said. "That's great for the customers, but it's not necessarily great for the model companies. And it does introduce new questions around their revenue trajectories." October data showed a partial rebound, with token spend up 8.9% from September 23 to October 23. But Kharazian said the headwinds remain strong. Bloomberg reported Friday that Anthropic's potential valuation sank from $2 trillion estimated in early October to $1.2 to $1.3 trillion, with credit agencies expected to assign a high junk rating. OpenAI lowered its proposed valuation to $1.25 trillion from $1.4 trillion and cut its latest fundraising goal by about $10 billion. #### Why this matters for executives and strategy leaders The spending data challenges the investment thesis that AI revenue will grow unchecked. If the top 1% of spenders have reached a ceiling and new use cases like personal agents don't deliver the same economic productivity as coding tools, the revenue trajectories of major model companies look shakier. For those shaping AI strategy or procurement, the buyer's market means leverage to negotiate pricing and a strong incentive to build internal capabilities around cost-efficient model routing. Professionals developing [AI strategy development courses](https://completeaitraining.com/learningpath/ai-for-strategy-managers/) are already addressing how to evaluate vendor pricing dynamics and avoid lock-in during this shift. The message from the data is clear: usage will keep growing, but the bill doesn't have to. --- This is the Markdown form of https://completeaitraining.com/news/ai-spending-flatlines-despite-rising-token-volumes-as-price/. The whole site is mapped at https://completeaitraining.com/llms.txt.