Corporate AI Spending Just Stalled Right as Anthropic Lines Up Its Big IPO

For most of the summer, corporate America treated artificial intelligence tokens like an open bar on a company credit card. In July alone, U.S. business spending on AI models jumped 42 percent in a single month.

Then the finance department walked in and looked at the receipt.

Fresh corporate card and bill-pay numbers from spend-management platform Ramp show that enterprise AI token spending grew by just 1.5 percent combined across August and September. October brought a modest 8.9 percent bounce, but the summer hypergrowth curve has flattened out—and the timing could hardly be more awkward for Anthropic as the Claude maker lines up its initial public offering.

Winning the Market Right as the Tab Shrinks

If you only looked at market share charts, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei would appear to be holding all the cards heading into a Wall Street debut.

According to Ramp's AI Index, which tracks real invoices and card swipes across tens of thousands of U.S. companies, Anthropic now captures 60.5 percent of all corporate AI token spending. OpenAI sits in second place at 35.1 percent, while Google and Elon Musk's xAI trail around 2 percent or less. Much of Anthropic's lead comes from software engineering teams hooking Claude Code directly into their daily workflows.

Winning 60 percent of the pie is great for an IPO pitch deck. The headache for prospective public-market investors is that the pie itself suddenly stopped expanding at 40 percent a month.

Why Usage Is Rising While Dollar Growth Stalls

Does a 1.5 percent late-summer growth figure mean companies are abandoning AI? Not according to Ramp lead economist Ara Kharazian.

Over 55 percent of U.S. businesses on Ramp now pay for at least one AI tool, and raw token volume still climbs every month. Why did the dollar growth flatten out? Price cuts and stingier engineering bosses.

Whenever OpenAI or Anthropic chops API token prices to undercut the other, customers get to run the exact same code for half the cash. Meanwhile, CTOs quit letting staff fire off every casual prompt to top-shelf frontier models. Engineering teams now slap hard monthly caps on employee accounts and route everyday chores—like summarizing a meeting or drafting a support ticket—to dirt-cheap smaller models.

Where the $10,000-a-Head Budgets Went

Beneath the headline slowdown sits an even bigger concentration risk for AI valuations.

Ramp's transaction data shows that roughly 80 percent of all enterprise revenue at Anthropic and OpenAI comes from just the top 1 percent of their corporate buyers. Those heavy spenders aren't Fortune 500 banks or Midwest manufacturers; they are almost entirely venture-backed tech startups.

At the peak of the summer binge, that top 1 percent of AI-obsessed firms was spending nearly $10,000 per employee on AI tokens. By late summer, even those power spenders began trimming their bills.

For Wall Street bankers pricing Anthropic's upcoming IPO, that concentration changes the math. Selling a multi-hundred-billion-dollar valuation is easy when corporate card swipes are compounding 42 percent a month. It gets a lot tougher when four-fifths of your enterprise revenue depends on Silicon Valley startups that just figured out how to cap their token budgets.