Top US Artificial Intelligence Firms Decreased AI Expenditure Per Employee By 10% In August

Ramp Index (September 2026): Average AI spend per employee among the top 1% of US AI companies declined by 9.7% in August to $7,205/month. Token costs have fallen by 41% since March 2026 to $0.68/Million Tokens. Businesses are actively migrating to more cost effective models as the proportion of costly frontier models used in enterprises fell from 53% to 45% between March and August.

The AI market is maturing and businesses are prioritizing cost over hype when selecting their preferred models. This poses an interesting challenge for OpenAI and Anthropic who need to ensure they can scale their user base sufficiently to compensate for declining token prices. Especially as only 6.4% of AI companies are currently using open source models.