US Corporate AI Spending Hits Record in October as Growth Slows to 1.65 Percent

US corporate AI spending reached an all-time high in October 2026 while growing just 1.65 percent month over month, according to the Ramp AI Index — a record built on a strikingly narrow base of buyers.

The index, published by financial services provider Ramp and drawn from payment data of more than 85,000 US companies, paints a market where spending keeps climbing but the climb is slowing, the buyer pool is concentrated, and prices are falling fast enough that usage is outpacing dollars.

The headline numbers deserve scrutiny before celebration. A typical company in Ramp's dataset spent $16.32 per employee per month on AI in October — less than a dollar more than in September. The top one percent of companies by AI spending paid a median of $10,200 per employee per month, up nine percent. In plain words: the record high reflects a small group of heavy spenders, not broad adoption.

How reliable is the Ramp AI Index?

Ramp itself flags the limits of its own data, and those caveats matter more than the headline growth figure. Free AI tools and usage through personal accounts do not appear in the payments data, so some real AI consumption goes uncounted.

Two further constraints come directly from Ramp. Separate metrics on token volume and spending draw only from companies using Ramp Token Spend Management, and Ramp says those figures are not representative of overall AI spending on the platform. The customer base itself skews growth-oriented, tech-savvy, and larger than US businesses overall — which means AI adoption is likely overstated relative to the wider economy. The index is a useful signal of direction, not a census.

Who actually pays for AI?

The concentration problem is structural, according to Ramp chief economist Ara Kharazian, whose earlier analysis identified risks that he says persist in the October data. One percent of companies drive 80 percent of revenue for OpenAI and Anthropic, Ramp reports.

That top tier consists mostly of venture-backed firms in tech, finance, and technical services. Outside those sectors, Ramp's data shows AI adoption barely spreading — a sobering counterpoint to claims that AI has become general-purpose business infrastructure.

For OpenAI and Anthropic, the revenue dependence on a tiny customer base is a real business risk: if a handful of venture-backed firms cut spending, the impact lands directly on the model providers' top line.

OpenAI outpaces Anthropic in spending growth

Business customers' spending on OpenAI grew 2.1 percent month over month in October, compared with 0.5 percent for Anthropic, according to Ramp.

Adoption figures tell a related story. Anthropic reached 44.8 percent adoption among Ramp's business customers, up 1.1 percentage points, while OpenAI held steady at 40.6 percent. Overall adoption of AI services rose to 56.8 percent — again, within a dataset that likely overstates adoption.

SpacexSI grew 2.2 percent, making it the fastest-growing software company in Ramp's entire dataset, with a 6.3 percent market share on the platform. Ramp's own framing urges caution: the company's models are not particularly noteworthy, and the growth probably reflects the coding tool Cursor, which belongs to SpacexSI. The 6.3 percent share most likely does not reflect the broader market — another instance of dataset bias, not a breakout win for Grok.

Why is spending growing slower than usage?

The average price per million processed text tokens (the standard billing unit for language model access) dropped 21 percent last month, according to Ramp. Usage volume is growing faster than spending, so effective AI costs keep falling.

Ramp attributes the price decline to competitive pressure between OpenAI and Anthropic, along with open-weight models from China. Cheaper tokens are good for buyers. For providers, they mean revenue growth depends entirely on volume outpacing price erosion — a race that October's modest 1.65 percent spending growth suggests is tightening.

What is changing inside companies?

Software development teams accounted for 72 percent of all tracked AI spending in October — still the dominant use case, but down from summer highs. Customer support and customer success departments posted the strongest growth, with their share of AI spending climbing from 0.8 percent in June to 13.3 percent in October, possibly driven by AI chatbots in customer service. Leadership teams also spent slightly more.

Kharazian notes that customer support's growth does not match the rapid expansion development teams posted earlier this year. These newer use cases also tend to favor cheaper, faster models over the most expensive flagship ones.

That shift carries a margin implication for OpenAI and Anthropic: new customers may bring lower margins than the developer-heavy base they started with. For now, the premium tier still dominates spending — the share of the most expensive models, which Kharazian identifies as Opus, Fable, Sol, and Astra, edged up slightly to 69.5 percent of total spending in October.

What the numbers say when read together

Three facts frame the month. Growth hit a record high at 1.65 percent — modest by the standards of a supposedly explosive market. One percent of companies supply 80 percent of OpenAI's and Anthropic's revenue. And token prices fell 21 percent in a single month, faster than spending rose.

The takeaway in plain words: October's record spending rests on a concentrated elite of buyers, while broad corporate adoption — at $16.32 per employee for the typical firm — remains marginal. If customer support keeps growing on cheaper models, the providers' revenue quality, not just quantity, becomes the metric to watch.