Ramp, the corporate card and expense management company, just published its latest AI Index, built from real spending data across more than seventy thousand US businesses. The headline finding cuts against what most people would assume: businesses are using AI more than ever, but paying less for it overall.
The reason is simple. OpenAI and Anthropic are locked in an aggressive price war, and the cuts are landing faster than usage is growing. Usage is up roughly fifty percent since spending peaked back in July and hit a fresh record in the last week of September, even as total dollars spent kept sliding.
In that final week of September, Anthropic held fifty one percent of business token spending tracked by Ramp, with OpenAI just behind at forty four and a half percent. Both companies have been cutting prices on their best models and pushing cheaper, lighter versions meant for everyday tasks that do not need the full power of a flagship model.
The scale of the cuts is worth sitting with. One of OpenAI's newest low-cost models dropped in price by eighty percent, and Anthropic's latest flagship update launched priced well below its predecessor. Anthropic even walked back a planned price increase on an existing model rather than risk losing customers who were already complaining about rising AI bills.
The pullback shows up most clearly among the heaviest users. Spending per employee among the top one percent of AI-spending firms fell by nearly ten percent in a single month. Many of these companies are now writing internal rules that push staff toward cheaper standard models and save the expensive flagship models only for tasks that truly need them.
This is good news if you run a business and buy AI tools. It means the cost of using AI for writing, customer support, research, or coding help keeps dropping, and the two biggest AI companies are fighting each other over price to keep your business. That gives you leverage: if a vendor tries to lock you into a long contract at today's rate, you have real grounds to ask for better terms or to switch.
But do not mistake this for a permanent state of affairs. Price wars this fierce usually mean someone is selling below what it actually costs them to run these systems in order to win market share, and once the market settles, prices can firm back up. Treat today's low prices as a window to experiment and build habits, not as a number you can plan your budget around for years.
One more detail worth noting: cheaper, open models that companies can run themselves still barely register in paid business spending, well under five percent by Ramp's count. For now, most businesses are choosing to pay a subscription or per-use fee to OpenAI or Anthropic rather than manage AI systems on their own, even as free and low-cost alternatives multiply elsewhere.