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Comparative LLM Usage Across Sectors
Comparative real-world usage of LLMs and adjacent AI technologies from June 2025 to June 2026: which models (GPT-5, Claude, Gemini, Llama, Mistral, DeepSeek, Qwen) dominate which sectors, how they are deployed (hosted API, Bedrock/Azure, self-hosted vLLM/Ollama, RAG, agents, fine-tuning), what workloads they serve, and how organisations measure, budget, and publicly report token cost and actual spend.
- Claude Opus 4.8
- financial
- frontier
- academic
- vc
- blogs
- tech
Synthesised 2026-06-20
Full brief
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Enterprise spending on large language models roughly doubled in the first half of 2025, from $3.5 billion at the end of 2024 to $8.4 billion by mid-year, according to Menlo Ventures' survey of 150 technical leaders. That single figure captures the defining shift of the period: LLMs stopped being a curiosity bolted…
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academic
25 sources
Academic & arXiv
The academic literature on real-world LLM deployment has grown rapidly since mid-2025, with a cluster of empirical papers providing direct evidence on deployment shapes, cost structures, and workload patterns. A May 2025 arXiv preprint (Hou et al…
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blogs
25 sources
Blogs & Independent Thinkers
The clearest quantitative window into enterprise LLM adoption comes from Menlo Ventures' paired 2025 reports. The mid-year report recorded enterprise LLM API spend doubling from $3.5 billion to $8.4 billion in a single six-month stretch, driven by inference…
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financial
25 sources
Financial Press
Enterprise spending on large language models roughly doubled in the first half of 2025, rising from $3.5 billion at end-2024 to $8.4 billion by mid-year, according to Menlo Ventures' survey of 150 technical leaders. Market concentration remained high…
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frontier
25 sources
Frontier Lab & Model News
The period from mid-2025 to mid-2026 saw an extraordinary compression of frontier model releases across all major labs. OpenAI launched GPT-5 on 7 August 2025, describing it as a unified system that "exceeds OpenAI's prior breakthroughs in frontier…
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tech
25 sources
Tech Industry & Practitioner
Developer usage of LLMs, as captured by the Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey (49,000+ respondents across 177 countries), is heavily concentrated at the top. OpenAI GPT models lead with 81–82% developer adoption, followed by Claude Sonnet models at 43–45%…
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vc
25 sources
VC & Analyst Reports
The headline finding from Menlo Ventures' mid-2025 survey of 150 technical leaders is a market leadership reversal: enterprise LLM spend more than doubled from $3.5 billion in late 2024 to $8.4 billion by mid-2025, with Anthropic displacing OpenAI as the…
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