Enterprise AI annualized spending surged 5.4x to $177 billion, with Anthropic capturing 55% of model API budgets.

Beating AI News Flash: Menlo Ventures has released its 2026 Enterprise AI Report. According to its estimates, as of September this year, the annualized spending scale of the global enterprise AI deployment market reached $176.8 billion, 5.4 times last year's $33 billion.

This round of growth is mainly driven by increased investment from existing customers. The survey shows that the proportion of paying enterprises rose from 55% to 65%, but the average AI spending of surveyed enterprises has already risen to 4.7 times last year's level. When setting budgets at the beginning of the year, they had originally planned to increase it only to 1.9 times.

AI Agents are an important reason driving the increase in spending. In the past, model calls were mainly initiated proactively by employees; now Agents can execute tasks continuously and call multiple models in parallel, and may continue consuming tokens even without anyone operating them. Data from OpenRouter shows that Agents already contribute 80% of the platform's token consumption.

The gap between model vendors is also widening. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google together account for 69% of enterprise AI deployment spending, up from 50% last year. Looking only at large model API spending, Anthropic's share rose from 40% to 55%, OpenAI's rose from 27% to 31%, and Google's fell from 21% to 9%. In the AI coding tools market, Claude Code and Codex together captured 70% of spending.