Menlo models AI spending
By OpenTools Team
Annualized, not booked.
Dollars
Menlo’s November 3 report models $176.8 billion in annualized deployment spending as of September 2026, not January–September cash, despite the chart’s YTD label. Morning Consult surveyed nearly 400 US decision‑makers overseeing over $4 billion in AI spending, September 8–26, 2026. Production API shares weight reported workloads by AI spending; prior years reclassify data‑labeling vendors into development.1
Tokens
Separate OpenRouter weekly API‑key token cohorts span September 1, 2025–September 28, 2026, skewing toward developers/startups. They cannot establish enterprise market shares or ROI. Menlo invests in Anthropic and OpenRouter; the page lacks microdata, confidence intervals and a fully reproducible model.1
Document review, January 2022; archive, not Menlo research. Photo: Shixart1985 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Resized and display‑cropped.
Sources
- 1.menlovc.com (menlovc.com)
- 2.Shixart1985 / Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org)
- 3.CC BY 2.0 (creativecommons.org)