Menlo estimates companies spent $177 billion on AI by September 2026

Menlo Ventures released its 2026 State of Enterprise AI report on November 3, 2026. The report combines a survey of nearly 400 U.S. enterprise decision-makers overseeing more than $4 billion in AI spending with a bottom-up market model. Menlo estimates that enterprise AI deployment spending reached $176.8 billion by September 2026, up from $33 billion a year earlier — a 5.4-fold increase, compared with 3.9-fold growth the year before. Menlo puts the market at $1.7 billion in 2023.

Menlo estimates $176.8 billion in enterprise spending on using AI, against $102.5 billion on building models. Menlo puts it as $1.70 of deployment revenue for every $1 spent training models. Tim Tully, a partner at Menlo, said: “Enterprise AI spending has jumped more than fivefold, from $33 billion last year to $177 billion this year.”

According to the report, on OpenRouter, a platform that routes developers to hundreds of models, agents now generate 80% of all tokens — about 130.9 trillion a week, roughly seven times human-driven usage. Menlo says agent traffic overtook human traffic in early February and has grown 37-fold since, against 5-fold growth for humans. Derek Xiao, a principal at Menlo, said: “Agents are changing the economics of software. When AI can do the work itself, enterprise spending is no longer constrained by the number of employees using it, but by how much work it can get done.”

Menlo estimates that Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google together capture 69% of enterprise AI spending — $122.7 billion, up from 50% last year. Within enterprise LLM API spending, Anthropic rose from 40% to 55%, OpenAI from 27% to 31%, and Google fell from 21% to 9%. In Menlo’s survey, companies on average spent 4.7 times their 2025 level against a planned 1.9 times — roughly 2.5 times what they budgeted. The share of enterprises paying for AI rose from 55% to 65%, which Menlo says suggests growth is driven mainly by more spending among existing adopters.

According to Menlo, coding ($34.0 billion) and enterprise chatbots and assistants ($25.0 billion) make up 76% of the $77.3 billion application market. AI-native companies capture 96% of coding spend, while incumbents still lead established categories such as IT (91%), data science (88%), and HR (68%). Menlo calls healthcare the largest vertical industry market, at $3.7 billion. Open-source models handle about one in five tokens but only about one in 25 dollars of model spending.

The dollar figures are Menlo’s estimates, built from survey responses, public filings, and third-party reports. Menlo discloses that it is an investor in Anthropic and OpenRouter. The report notes that OpenRouter is one channel, and its token-share figures draw on OpenRouter data and Menlo estimates of model mix.

Menlo says coding and chatbots lead application spending because they offer environments in which agents can act, workflows they can learn, and results they can verify, and that it expects the frontier labs’ concentration to ease as capabilities mature and application companies bring them to new markets.