[Enterprise AI Annualized Spending Surges 5.4-Fold to $177 Billion, Anthropic Takes 55% of Model API Budget] Beating AI News: Menlo Ventures released its 2026 Enterprise AI report. According to their estimates, as of September this year, the global enterprise AI deployment market's annualized spending reached $176.8 billion, 5.4 times the $33 billion of last year. This growth is primarily driven by increased investment from existing customers. The survey shows that the percentage of paying enterprises rose from 55% to 65%, but the average AI spending of surveyed enterprises has increased to 4.7 times that of last year. At the beginning of the year, they originally planned to only increase to 1.9 times. AI agents are a significant driver of this spending increase. Previously, model calls were mainly initiated by employees; now, agents can continuously execute tasks and call multiple models in parallel, potentially consuming tokens even without human intervention. Data from OpenRouter shows that agents now contribute 80% of the platform's token consumption. The gap between model vendors is also widening. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google collectively account for 69% of enterprise AI deployment spending, up from 50% last year. Looking at large model API spending alone, Anthropic's share rose from 40% to 55%, OpenAI from 27% to 31%, while Google's fell from 21% to 9%. In the AI programming tools market, Claude Code and Codex together capture 70% of the spending. [Original Link]