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AK Ara Kharazian Ara Kharazian Lead Economist at Ramp.

“It's not a demand issue … firms are using more AI by pretty much any measure. … Those tokens have come down so significantly in price because of this price war that their actual spend has remained relatively flat.”

Prof G Markets · Money & Markets · November 2026

“It's not a demand issue … firms are using more AI by pretty much any measure. … Those tokens have come down so significantly in price because of this price war that their actual spend has remained relatively flat.” — Ara Kharazian, Prof G Markets

Context

Ed Elson opened the Ramp AI Index segment with overall business AI spend growing under 2% in October. Ara Kharazian explains that usage is up but price cuts mean revenue is not, which raises the question of where OpenAI and Anthropic grow next, days before Anthropic's IPO.

Transcript

Prof G Markets Around 23:06 into the episode
Speaker 1

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Ed Elson

…out to me is just the overall AI spend month over month, 2% growth, which is just significantly lower than what we've seen in previous months when you've been tracking this. Tell us a little bit about what we saw in terms of token spending and what it says about the AI business at the moment.

Speaker 1

…month over month for most of 2026, and that started to slow down over the last couple of months, now down into the single digits for both OpenAI and Anthropic. Now, important to note that it's not a demand issue and that firms are using more AI by pretty much any measure. They're using more models. They're spreading their spend across multiple models. They're using more tokens, but it's that those tokens have come down so significantly in price because of this price war that their actual spend has remained relatively flat. Now, that's opening a lot of new questions for OpenAI and Anthropic. The main one being, where do we go from here? In my post, I outlined some of what I thought were new fronts in the AI trade and ways in which they would have to start competing with each other that they didn't necessarily have to a year before. And that's because there's now new demand from businesses for cost-effective and…

Ed Elson

Yeah, just looking at the data that you found on the average price per token. So for OpenAI and Anthropic, token prices fell almost 15% last month. The average price per million tokens at Anthropic is 55 cents. OpenAI, it's 50 cents. I mean, is this a story of open weight models, presumably mostly…

Speaker 1

You know, I wouldn't even blame it on the Chinese models. Not that they don't matter, but in our data set, Chinese models have less than 5% of the market as far as business spend goes. You know, I honestly think that if you were to ban all the Chinese models tomorrow, you would still see this kind…

Ed Elson

Just looking at Anthropic specifically, last week you said that their Q4 business spend is on track to increase between 15 and 25% quarter over quarter. And just for context, the previous quarter, we learned that their revenue grew 47%. And I believe that before we learned that number, you had put…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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