Benchmark
Ramp's monthly research series tracking U.S. business AI adoption and spend from its own transaction and token data.
Ramp's September data has 43.8% of its businesses paying Anthropic and 40.6% paying OpenAI, a 3.2-point gap after OpenAI gained 1.12 points. The figures imply more than half of paying firms buy from both, so the gap says little about vendor lock-in.
Reality
Ramp puts median AI spend at the heaviest adopters at $7,400 per employee in July, up from $2,590 in January. A 1,500-organisation OpenAI study found token output has no meaningful link to revenue per employee.
Reality
Reuters says Anthropic is weighing a new model to answer OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, days after Dario Amodei published an essay arguing that labs must slow capability gains. The offering has slipped to November.
Reality
Ramp's September index has the top 1% of US AI buyers paying $7,205 a head. Its chief economist points to August vacations, cheaper tokens and a steady migration down from frontier models.
Reality
Anthropic published three scenarios and an interactive model, declined to say which is likelier, and left aggregate demand out of the arithmetic. The same newsletter carrying the research reports business AI spending is falling.
Reality
Ramp's corporate spending data puts the effective US business price at 68 cents a million tokens, down from $1.15 in March, and the customers who supply most enterprise AI revenue trimmed per-employee spend as it fell.
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Ramp's June card-spend index puts open-source and Chinese model serving in firms spending $248 per employee, 23 times the median. The cheap-model migration is starting at the top.
Reality
American businesses have found a price they will not pay for frontier AI. Ramp's July spend data locates the weak link in customer budgets rather than in model quality.
Reality