NEW Ramp AI Index: In October, AI spend rose 2%. OpenAI and Anthropic growth fell to low single-digits.
Engineering teams drove 72% of spend, followed by customer service and leadership.
Given this relatively modest growth in spend, and new competitive dynamics that may stick around, the markt should look to new fronts in the AI trade.
Our October data recap covers token growth, agentic usage, token prices, model lab retention, and inference providers. Here's what stood out.
1/ October in tokens: 790T tokens, up 25x from January.
Hedgeye CEO @KeithMcCullough has called every stock market crash since 2008.
Now he’s calling the next Quad 4.
“First half of 2027, that’s pretty definitively Quad 4.”
Read the full note 👇
The biggest story of the year? Agents.
Enterprises planned to spend 1.9x last year’s AI budget. On average, they spent 4.7x.
Agents change the economics of AI. They work in parallel and keep going after people step away, so spend scales with work, not headcount.
The same pattern shows up in usage. On @OpenRouter*, a platform that gives developers access to hundreds of AI models, agents now generate 80% of all tokens, about 7x human-driven usage. Agent traffic is up 37x since it overtook humans in February.
The center of AI usage has moved from a person with a question to a machine with a task.
More from our 2026 State of Enterprise AI report: https://t.co/YTjYg03W0w
*Menlo Ventures is an investor in OpenRouter.
This is from the Roblox Q3 2026 Shareholder Letter. The top chart is daily users of their MCP server, the bottom is assets uploaded. Opus 5.5 was released September 22nd. Over the past month, more than 80% of the top 100 games used AI. Things changed in September.
This is very needed. Talking to models like Claude about anything that has an overlap with an area like legal, healthcare, etc is mind numbing. They’re so desperate to hedge and steer away from grey area that they often are really avoiding the real question.
Think 2026 will be remembered as the year where AI went into mainstream adoption
Look at this list of what product launches we saw this year, and just imagine where we will be in a year from now
Before 2026, we didn't have
> Claude Cowork
> Opus 4.6
> GPT 5.3 Codex
> Sonnet 4.6
> Grok 4.20
> Gemini 3.1 Pro
> Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite
> GPT-5.4
> Gemma 4
> Claude Mythos
> Meta Muse Spark
> Opus 4.7
> GPT-5.5
> DeepSeek V4
> Gemini 3.5 Flash
> Opus 4.8
> Fable 5 / Mythos 5
> Sonnet 5
> Muse Image + Video
> Grok 4.5
> GPT-5.6 Sol Terra Luna
> Gemini 3.6 Flash
> Opus 5
> Muse Code
> Grok 4.6
> Gemini 3.7 Flash
> Fable 5.1 / Mythos 5.1
> Gemini 3.8 Flash
> GPT-6 Astra
> Meta's Muse agent
> Grok 4.7
> Opus 5.5
> GPT-6 Sol + Luna
> Sonnet 5.5
> GPT-6.1 Sol
> Gemini 4 Argon
> Nano Banana 2.1
> Haiku 5.5
> Muse Wonder
> GPT-6.1 Terra
The Ultimate List of Artificial Intelligence Neolabs now has 100+ companies!
A Neolab is a usually pre-revenue startup with elite researchers buying a lot of compute, often with a $1B+ valuation.
The list is now public and open for everyone to explore:
https://t.co/ldCq8uP3Vl