# AI Token Spending Climbs 23% After Two Months of Little Growth

By John Kim

Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/business/37703
Published: 2026-10-22T10:00:11.000Z
Updated: 2026-10-22T10:00:11.000Z
Section: Business

> The top 1% of businesses in Ramp’s U.S. customer sample accounted for 80% of combined spending on OpenAI and Anthropic. Token volume rose 52.4% as the combined price fell to 64 cents per million tokens.

Business spending on artificial-intelligence tokens rose 23% in the latest full-week comparison, while token volume climbed faster and the combined price per million tokens fell, showing a pickup after two months of little growth.

For the week ending Oct. 11, spending was 23% above the week ending Sept. 13. Token volume was up 52.4% over the same comparison, while the combined price for OpenAI and Anthropic tokens fell 25.4%, to 64 cents per million from 86 cents. The figures track three parts of token use: spending, volume and the combined unit price.

Businesses in Ramp’s U.S. customer sample showed concentrated spending on the two providers: the top 1% accounted for 80% of their combined OpenAI and Anthropic spending. That finding concerns the sampled businesses and their spending on the two companies; it does not measure either provider’s share of total revenue. It is also separate from token data covering businesses that use Ramp’s AI Token Spend Management product.

Token spending had shown little growth during August and September even as token volume rose. “Because of August and September, we’ve recorded two straight months of virtually no growth in token spend,” Ramp Lead Economist Ara Kharazian wrote in an Oct. 14 update.

A broader AI spending measure looked at monthly spending per employee among the top 1% of firms paying for AI. In September, their median was $9,568 per employee, 11.7% above August but 3.1% below the July high of $9,873. This measure is distinct from the 80% share for OpenAI and Anthropic and from the token figures for product users.

Paid adoption also spread across the businesses in Ramp’s sample. Paid AI use reached 55.9% of businesses in September, an increase of 0.62 percentage points from August. Anthropic’s paid adoption rate was 43.8%, while OpenAI’s was 40.6%; the figures overlap because some businesses paid for both.

The broader index tracks card and bill-pay transactions from more than 85,000 U.S. businesses. Token spending, volume and price cover a subset of Ramp customers using its AI Token Spend Management product, so they may not reflect the full market. Free AI tools and services paid through employees’ personal accounts may not appear in the data, meaning the figures capture observed payments rather than every form of business AI use.