Menlo: enterprise AI spend hits $177 billion, Anthropic takes 55% of API spend

Menlo Ventures estimates that enterprise spending on deploying generative AI reached $176.8 billion by September 2026, up 5.4 times from $33 billion a year earlier, in its 2026 State of Enterprise AI report. The firm says every dollar spent developing models this year generated $1.70 of deployment revenue, and 55% of AI spending came from new budgets rather than existing software or labor budgets.

Frontier labs took 69% of deployment spending, up from 50% last year. Anthropic's share of enterprise API spending rose from 40% to 55% and OpenAI's from 27% to 31%, while Google's fell from 21% to 9%. Open source models accounted for 19% of usage but only 4% of spending.

Agents drove much of the growth. Agent traffic on OpenRouter has risen 37 times since it overtook human traffic in February, compared with five times for human use. Coding, at $34 billion, and chatbots, at $25 billion, made up 76% of a $77.3 billion application market, and the labs' own coding agents grew from $1 billion to $24 billion.