**Top AI spenders cut per-employee costs by nearly 10 percent in August**

> The Ramp AI Index for September 2026 shows AI spending per employee among the top 1 percent of US companies fell nearly 10 percent in August. The price per million tokens has dropped 41 percent since March 2026, and companies are actively shifting usage away from expensive frontier models toward cheaper alternatives. For providers like OpenAI and Anthropic, the question is whether volume growth is fast enough to make up for falling prices. AI in practice Copy the url to clipboard Share this article Go to comment section Top AI spenders cut per-employee costs by nearly 10 percent in August Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian Sep 10, 2026 Midjourney prompted by THE DECODER Ask about this article… Search Ramp's AI Index for September 2026 shows falling per-employee AI spending among the highest-spending US companies, while usage shifts away from expensive frontier models toward cheaper alternatives. Financial services company Ramp tracks monthly US business spending on AI services through its AI Index . The September edition shows AI adoption still growing, but at a slower pace. The companies that spend the most on AI spent less in August than they did the month before. In August, 43.8 percent of US companies paid for Anthropic services, up 0.34 percentage points. OpenAI gained just 0.09 percentage points to reach 39.8 percent. Technical sectors like IT and finance continue to lead adoption. Ad The biggest spenders are cutting back Spending by the top 1 percent of companies matters most for model providers because those firms drive the bulk of enterprise revenue. Median per-employee spending in that group fell 9.7 percent in August to $7,205. Because the top 1 percent is a small pool of firms, this estimate tends to be more volatile than other segments and may be revised later, according to the report. Ad AI spend per employee at the top 1 percent of companies fell about 10 percent in August, while spending at the top 10 percent and the median continued to climb. | Image: Ramp AI Index Some of the drop is likely seasonal, since many engineers take vacation in August, according to Ramp chief economist Ara Kharazian. Two other forces are also pushing spending down across industries: falling token prices and a steady migration toward cheaper models. Token prices keep falling and companies are trading down The effective price per million tokens has dropped 41 percent since its March 2026 peak to $0.68, according to Ramp. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have announced further price cuts recently. Usage volume is growing, but Kharazian says it may not grow fast enough to offset the price decline. Ad The effective price per million tokens fell 41 percent from its March 2026 peak to $0.68. OpenAI has been consistently cheaper than Anthropic throughout. | Image: Ramp AI Index Most of the volume growth is coming from cheaper standard models like GPT-5.6 Terra and Claude's Sonnet series. Frontier models like Opus, Fable, and Sol held a 45 percent share of all tokens consumed in early September, down from 53 percent at the start of August. Companies are putting internal policies in place that restrict use of expensive frontier models, Kharazian says, because standard models are increasingly seen as good enough while costing significantly less. The token share of frontier models like Opus and Sol dropped from 53 percent in early August to 45 percent by early September as standard and lite models picked up share. | Image: Ramp AI Index Open-weight models still aren't moving the needle The shift toward cheaper models isn't being driven by open-weight or Chinese alternatives. Only 6.4 percent of AI-using companies on the Ramp platform run open-weight m...

**来源信息**
- **来源**：Hacker News：AI 热帖
- **分类**：行业
- **发布时间**：2026-09-12 18:37（北京时间）
- **原文**：[打开原文](https://the-decoder.com/top-ai-spenders-cut-per-employee-costs-by-nearly-10-percent-in-august)