Ramp's AI Index for September 2026 shows a decline in per-employee AI spending among the highest-spending US companies. The report indicates that while AI adoption is still growing, the pace has slowed, with the top 1 percent of companies spending less in August than the previous month.
The median per-employee spending for the top 1 percent of companies fell 9.7 percent in August to $7,205. This decline is partly attributed to seasonal factors, as many engineers take vacations during August, according to Ramp chief economist Ara Kharazian.
Token prices have also dropped significantly, with the effective price per million tokens falling 41 percent since its March 2026 peak to $0.68. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have announced further price cuts, contributing to the overall cost reduction.
"The effective price per million tokens fell 41 percent from its March 2026 peak to $0.68," said Ara Kharazian, Ramp's chief economist. Kharazian noted that while usage volume is growing, it may not grow fast enough to offset the price decline.
The shift toward cheaper models is evident as standard models like GPT-5.6 Terra and Claude's Sonnet series gain traction. 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.
Open-weight models still aren't moving the needle, with only 6.4 percent of AI-using companies on the Ramp platform running open-weight models. Kharazian also flagged what he called "Cracks in the AI Thesis," pointing to weak Fable 5 adoption and the shift toward cheaper models as warning signs for providers.
Source: thedecoder
