A16z AI spending concentration report

Andreessen Horowitz data shows the top 1% of US paying AI consumers average $903 per month, up from $504 in January 2025, and account for 19.5% of all consumer AI spending, more than the bottom 50% of users combined (16.6%). The median spend has remained flat at around $25 per month. One top-1% payer spends as much as roughly 59 bottom-half payers on average. Beyond the spending concentration, a16z's index also reveals limited adoption breadth: nearly half of US consumers report using AI, but only 25% engage with it daily, and only 13% of users who pay for one AI product pay for even one other. Nine of 15 major consumer internet categories have no AI products in the Top 100, including streaming, social, dating, gaming, and travel. The economics of serving heavy users differ sharply between model labs and app developers. Labs pay only serving costs when a power user drives high usage, while apps built on a lab's API pay API prices and cannot easily absorb cost overages. Anthropic noted one $200-per-month Max subscriber ran up tens of thousands of dollars in usage. Apps targeting top-tier spenders may need to own more of the model stack; Cursor's Composer coding model is cited as an example of that approach.