Top 1% AI spenders cut spend 10% to $7.2K/employee as tech giants shift to open models
HankYeomans · x · 2026-09-10
- Ramp AI Index data shows AI spend among the top 1% of business spenders fell to $7.2K per employee per month in August, down 10% from July's $8K peak.
- Gergely Orosz (Pragmatic Engineer) explains the why: large companies aren't using fewer tokens — they're moving simpler workloads from SOTA proprietary models to cheaper open models. Uber, Pinterest, Stripe, Coinbase, Ramp and AT&T are saving 50% on simpler tasks via smart model routing.
- Ara Kharazian at Ramp attributes the topping out to model price wars and spend shifting to standard/lite tiers rather than Chinese open models.
- Also: Linear and Anthropic are experimenting with agents auto-fixing bugs (works better than expected, still needs review); OpenAI pulled GPT models from Cursor as SpaceX becomes a frontier rival; OpenRouter token usage is exploding.
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