Ramp data shows AI spending stalling just as Anthropic nears its IPO

The slowdown is concentrated where the money is. Ramp's lead economist Ara Kharazian said almost all AI spending comes from venture-backed, high-growth tech companies, leaving the market exposed if that cohort stumbles in unison. He said the top 1% of firms — the most "AI-pilled" — spent just below the $10,000 per employee mark in August and September, down from summer peaks. Because that sliver drives so much of the total, he said its stutter is "sufficient to slow down revenue entirely" even with rising volumes. Growth among median firms, at $12–$15 per employee monthly, and the top 10%, at $600–$1,000, hasn't closed the gap.

Kharazian, who has blogged under the title "Cracks in the AI Thesis," questions whether the rest of the economy ever reaches the 1% ceiling. Demand for AI coding agents is real in software and finance, he noted, but a doctor's office or car dealership may never need to spend at that level. "The era of hypergrowth may be over," he said, arguing there's less juice left to squeeze from the top cohort.

October offered a partial reprieve: token spend rose 8.9% from September 23 to October 23, though Kharazian called the headwinds on growth strong. He attributes the stall to pricing rather than demand — OpenAI cut API prices in half for GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna in September, and Anthropic made significant reductions on Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5. Anthropic said in a recent filing that decision slashed its revenue growth by roughly $600 million. Both companies also lean on enterprise discounts meant to lock in spend but that dent revenue targets.

Kharazian disputed the Big Tech subsidy playbook that once let Uber and Lyft undercut ride-hailing rivals before prices rose once consolidation set in: in AI, he argued, there are simply too many competitors for lock-in to pay off the same way. The open question for builders and operators is whether October's bounce proves durable or whether discounting keeps decoupling usage from revenue — and whether investors entering Anthropic's IPO will underwrite growth rates that Ramp's own data no longer supports.