Menlo Ventures published on Tuesday (3) the 2026 edition of its The State of Enterprise AI report, with a headline figure that sums up the market's turn: enterprise AI spending reached $176.8 billion through September 2026, 5.4 times the $33 billion recorded in 2025. Growth accelerated from the 3.9x jump of the previous year.
The most revealing finding is not new adopters, but deeper spending by existing users. The share of enterprises paying for AI rose only from 55% to 65%, indicating that growth came mainly from existing customers spending far more: on average, 2.5 times what they had budgeted, after planning nearly double their 2025 spending.
Agents lead AI consumption
Autonomous agents are driving this expansion. According to OpenRouter data cited in the report, agents now generate 80% of tokens on the platform, roughly seven times human usage. Since overtaking human traffic in February, agent token consumption has grown 37x, compared with 5x for human usage.
Enterprise AI application spending reached about $77 billion, up from $19 billion a year earlier. Coding accounts for $34 billion and AI assistants and productivity tools for $25 billion, together 76% of that total. For every $1 spent on training models, enterprises spend $1.70 putting AI to work.
Three labs concentrate spending
Concentration also rose: Anthropic, OpenAI and Google capture 69% of enterprise AI deployment spending, up from 50% in 2025. In enterprise LLM API spending, Anthropic extended its lead from 40% to 55%, OpenAI rose from 27% to 31% and Google fell from 21% to 9%. Open-source models handle about one in five tokens, but only about one in 25 dollars of model spending.
How the report was made
Of the incremental spending, 55% came from new budgets and 22% from existing software budgets, which the report reads as expansion of the software market, not just tool replacement. The fourth annual edition combines a survey of nearly 400 U.S. enterprise decision-makers overseeing more than $4 billion in AI spending with a bottom-up market analysis. Total figures are Menlo Ventures estimates.
One transparency note on the source: Menlo Ventures is an investor in Anthropic and OpenRouter, two companies cited in the report's data. That does not invalidate the figures, but it is relevant context for reading the results.
Image credit: chart from Menlo Ventures released with the official announcement, via GlobeNewswire.
Sources: Menlo Ventures — 2026: The State of Enterprise AI; GlobeNewswire — Menlo Ventures announcement.
Transparency note: this article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence, based on Menlo Ventures' official announcement and independent coverage, with the figures checked against the cited sources. Readers are encouraged to consult the original sources for full context.
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