Beating AI News, Menlo Ventures releases its 2026 Enterprise AI Report. According to their estimate, by September this year, the annualized spending in the global enterprise AI deployment market reached $176.8 billion, a 5.4-fold increase from last year's $33 billion.

This growth is primarily driven by increased investment from existing customers. Survey results show that the percentage of paying enterprises rose from 55% to 65%, while the average AI spending per surveyed company has surged to 4.7 times last year's level—far exceeding the initial budget plans of 1.9 times at the beginning of the year.

AI Agents are a key driver behind rising expenditures. Previously, model calls were initiated manually by employees; now, Agents can execute tasks continuously and run multiple models in parallel. Even without human intervention, they may keep consuming tokens. Data from OpenRouter shows that Agents already account for 80% of token consumption on the platform.

The gap between model providers is widening. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google together hold 69% of enterprise AI deployment spending, up from 50% last year. Looking specifically at large model API spending, Anthropic’s share rose from 40% to 55%, OpenAI from 27% to 31%, while Google dropped from 21% to 9%. In the AI coding tools market, Claude Code and Codex together captured 70% of spending.