AI spending per employee fell in August at the biggest corporate spenders

Ramp's September 2026 AI Index shows median per-employee AI spending among the top one percent of US corporate spenders fell 9.7 percent in August to $7,205. The effective price per million tokens is down 41 percent from its March 2026 peak, to $0.68. Frontier models accounted for 45 percent of all tokens consumed in early September, down from 53 percent at the start of August, as companies adopt internal policies limiting the use of expensive models. In August, 43.8 percent of US companies paid for Anthropic services and 39.8 percent for OpenAI. Only 6.4 percent of AI-using companies on Ramp's platform run open-weight models, and 3.6 percent across all companies. Ramp chief economist Ara Kharazian says part of the drop may be seasonal.