Anthropic, OpenAI and Google command $122.7 billion of enterprise AI spend, 69% of all deployment dollars and up from 50% a year earlier, Menlo Ventures estimates in 2026: The State of Enterprise AI, published on 3 November. By our arithmetic on Menlo’s figures, the three labs took about 74% of the new enterprise AI dollars added in the year.
Menlo says the report draws on a survey of nearly 400 U.S. enterprise decision-makers responsible for more than $4 billion in AI spending, fielded by Morning Consult from September 8 to 26, 2026. Menlo Ventures is an investor in Anthropic and OpenRouter, which the report discloses.
Business Pill · Concentration Explained
A short explainer on concentration: when a few big pieces make most of a total. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss Menlo’s report or any lab.
The key insight: By our arithmetic on Menlo’s figures, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google added about $106.2 billion of the $143.8 billion of new enterprise AI deployment spend, roughly 74%, lifting their share from 50% to 69%.
Menlo writes: “We estimate Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google command $122.7B of enterprise spendโ69% of all deployment dollars, up from 50% last year and 2.3x the rest of the market combined”.
Its chart splits the labs’ total into $82.7 billion of API spend and $40.0 billion of first-party apps, against $54.1 billion for everyone else, out of $176.8 billion. The report says the labs’ spending “grew 7.5x YoY, compared with 3.3x for everyone else”.
Menlo says the concentration “is not just at the API layer”. Claude Code and Codex account for $24.0 billion, or 70%, of coding spend, and enterprise Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini make up $15.5 billion, or 62%, of AI chatbot and productivity spend, it says.
Menlo puts enterprise AI deployment spend at $33.0 billion in 2025 and $176.8 billion by September 2026. At 50%, the labs’ 2025 share comes to $16.5 billion, the same as Menlo’s chart shows for everyone else.
By our arithmetic, the labs added about $106.2 billion of the $143.8 billion of new spend, or roughly 74%. Everyone else added about $37.6 billion.
How Menlo Explains It
The report says: “For now, the money follows model progress”. It adds that value accrues to the labs that introduce a new capability, like long-horizon agents, and the initial apps they build around it.
Menlo also writes: “Over time though, we expect this concentration to ease as the capability matures and application companies bring it to new markets”.
The Structural Read
As we read the report, the labs win twice: Menlo puts $82.7 billion of their total in APIs and $40.0 billion in their own apps, and says Claude Code and Codex alone hold 70% of coding spend.
As we read Menlo’s explanation, the share follows capability, not distribution: the report says value accrues to the labs that introduce a new capability and the first apps built around it.
The framework argues: “That is why the AI economy is not a list of companies racing each other.”
As we read it, Menlo’s split shows the labs holding two layers at once, the API and the app on top of it. The framework is the owner’s argument and does not discuss Menlo’s report.
The dollar figures are Menlo’s estimates from “a bottoms-up model informed by survey responses, public filings, and third-party reports”, shown as annualized run rate. Menlo says prior-year figures were reclassified to this year’s taxonomy, which moved data labeling vendors like Mercor from deployment to development.
The 74% share of new spend is our arithmetic on Menlo’s rounded figures. Menlo is an investor in Anthropic, one of the three labs.
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Menlo Ventures estimates that Anthropic, OpenAI and Google take $122.7 billion, or 69%, of enterprise AI deployment spend, up from 50%. By our arithmetic, they captured about 74% of the year’s new dollars.
A note on sourcing. The figures, survey details and quotes come from Menlo Ventures’ 2026 State of Enterprise AI report, published on 3 November 2026, and where cited its December 2025 report. The charts in this piece are Menlo’s own, reproduced with Menlo’s attribution. Menlo Ventures is an investor in Anthropic and OpenRouter, among other companies the report names. The one figure labelled our arithmetic is ours, computed from Menlo’s numbers. We did not contact Menlo or the companies named.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
