US Business AI Spending Hit Record in October, Up Just 1.65%

US business AI spending rose 1.65% from September to reach a record level in October, according to the Ramp AI Index published November 11. The gain was the weakest possible signal of a record: barely positive growth on top of two near-flat months.

Ramp's index tracks payments for AI products by more than 85,000 American businesses using its corporate cards and bill-pay platform. It covers Ramp's customer base, not the whole economy. Ramp also cautions that its figures likely understate adoption and spend, because they miss free AI tools and work done on employees' personal accounts.

What does the data say about growth?

The strongest concrete shift is in price. The average price per million tokens fell 21% over the month. Token volumes continue to grow faster than token spend, which means falling unit prices are eating revenue growth at the model vendors.

Token spend rose 2.1% month over month for OpenAI and 0.5% for Anthropic. Frontier models — Anthropic's Opus, Fable and the top tiers of rivals — took 69.5% of spend, up from 67.7%.

Ramp lead economist Ara Kharazian said the slowdown fits his earlier warnings. "The risks I identified in the Cracks series remain," Kharazian wrote, referring to his recent posts arguing that assumptions of rapid AI spending growth are breaking down. In October he had reported "two straight months of virtually no growth in token spend" for August and September.

Who is spending?

Spending is highly concentrated. The top 1% of businesses account for about 80% of the revenue OpenAI and Anthropic earn from Ramp customers, Kharazian wrote. These heavy users are mostly venture-backed firms in tech, finance and technical services.

The spending tiers for October:

• Top 1% of firms: median $10,200 per employee per month, up 9%
• Top 10% of firms: $801, roughly flat
• Median firm: $16.32, up 93 cents

Ramp also began breaking spend out by department for the first time. Engineering teams drove 72% of classified AI spend in October, below summer highs. Customer success and support teams rose to 13.3% of classified spend, up from 0.8% in June — a sixteenfold gain in four months, likely from customer-service chatbots. Kharazian said support work fits cheaper, faster models rather than the highest-margin frontier models.

Is the vendor race changing?

Paid adoption figures show a new entrant gaining ground fast. SpaceXAI, Elon Musk's maker of Grok, reached 6.3% of Ramp businesses paying for it in October, up 2.2 points — the fastest gain of any vendor.

Vendor	October adoption	Change (points)
Anthropic	44.8%	+1.1
OpenAI	40.6%	0.0
SpaceXAI	6.3%	+2.2
Any AI vendor	56.8%	+1.0

Anthropic added 1.1 points to 44.8%, widening its lead over OpenAI, which held flat at 40.6%. Overall, 56.8% of businesses on Ramp now pay for some AI product, up 1.0 point from September.

Kharazian expects the market structure to shift. He said he expects "this two-way race to quickly turn into a 3-way race that puts greater price pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic."

The revenue context makes the pricing pressure material. Anthropic, which is preparing to list on Nasdaq, reported an $81 billion revenue run rate at the end of October. OpenAI's third-quarter revenue reportedly reached about $10 billion.

If token prices keep falling 21% a month while total spend grows under 2%, vendors will need volume growth, new use cases such as support chatbots, or enterprise contracts to sustain revenue expansion.