Menlo Ventures 2026 State of Enterprise AI: Enterprise AI Spend Hits $176.8B, Up 5.4x, as Anthropic Takes 55% of Enterprise API Spend
On November 3, Menlo Ventures released its fourth annual enterprise AI report. It estimates enterprise spending on using AI reached $176.8B by September 2026, up 5.4x from $33B in 2025. In enterprise LLM API spend, Anthropic rose from 40% to 55%, OpenAI from 27% to 31%, and Google fell from 21% to 9%. Coding is the largest app category at $34.0B. Figures come from a survey of about 400 US enterprise AI decision-makers plus third-party data, so they are estimates; Menlo is an Anthropic investor.
Key Takeaways
- Enterprise AI deployment spend: $1.7B (2023) to $8.5B (2024) to $33B (2025) to $176.8B by Sep 2026, up 5.4x vs 3.9x last year (Menlo estimate)
- Enterprise LLM API spend share: Anthropic 55% (from 40%), OpenAI 31% (from 27%), Google 9% (from 21%); open-source models are about 19% of usage but only 4% of spend
- App-layer spend is about $77.3B: coding $34.0B and chatbots/productivity $25.0B make up 76%; Claude Code and Codex account for $24.0B (70%) of coding spend
- On OpenRouter, agents generate 80% of tokens (about 130.9T per week), roughly 7x human usage, and have grown 37x since overtaking human traffic in February
- 55% of incremental AI spend comes from net-new budgets and 22% from existing software budgets; the share of enterprises paying for AI rose only from 55% to 65%
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