Ramp's data and Anthropic's new filing both show the heaviest AI spenders flattening after July, which matters for AI vendors and for anyone paying AI bills.
The businesses that spend the most on AI stopped spending more after July. Ramp, a spending platform, tracks transactions at more than 85,000 US businesses. Its latest AI Index shows the top 1% of firms spent $9,568 per employee in September, down from $9,873 in July. Anthropic's amended S-1, a filing for a public stock offering, shows a similar pattern: its quarterly revenue gain shrank for the first time.
The top 1% fell 13% from July to August, then recovered most of the drop in September but not all of it. Others kept climbing. The top 10% went from $740.47 to $813.43 in a month, and the median firm rose too. Ramp warns that the top 1% is a small group, so its figures swing more. Its customers also lean toward startups and tech-forward firms.
Anthropic's revenue was $16.96 billion in Q3, up from $11.56 billion in Q2. But the dollars added slowed. Q1 was $4.72 billion, Q2 added $6.84 billion, and Q3 added $5.40 billion, which is 21% less.
Ramp lead economist Ara Kharazian points mainly to falling prices for top AI models. Anthropic's filing backs that up. Claude Opus 5.5 cut customer cost per task by about 40% compared with Claude Opus 5. ZeroHedge's read of the filing puts Q3 price cuts at about $600 million. A heavy user with the same workload simply pays less.
Summer vacations explain less. To match Q2's gain, Anthropic needed about $1.44 billion more, roughly 8% of the quarter. The one seasonal dip with data, the December holidays, was about 3% of a quarter. An August dip would need to be about 2.5 times the size of Christmas.
Ramp previously found that 80% of spending on OpenAI and Anthropic comes from 1% of firms. In September, the top 1% spent a median of $9,567.53 per employee per month. The median firm spent $15.70. That is about 600 times more. One top firm with 100 employees spends about $957,000 a month, so matching it takes about 600 median firms of the same size.
New customers are arriving, but slowly and in smaller sizes. In September, 55.9% of Ramp businesses paid for AI, up 0.6 points. Anthropic's filing warns that any adverse change in demand from its largest customers could hurt its business.
The market is also splitting. Among Ramp businesses, 43.8% paid Anthropic, up 0.25 points. OpenAI rose 1.12 points to 40.6%. Anthropic still leads on dollars, with 60.5% of AI token spending in the week ending October 23.
Business owners who sell to other companies can run the same check. Rank customers by monthly spend, take the top 1%, and compare September to July. If that group is flat while the customer count grows, a few accounts carry the revenue and have stopped expanding.
Check whether a few big customers drive your revenue, and expect falling AI prices to shrink what you pay for the same work.
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