(Economist) Companies are scrambling to curtail soaring AI costs

“It’s going to be an absolute nightmare,” says an executive at a big American tech company. He is talking about an emerging problem for businesses that use artificial intelligence. AI agents—bots that can read, interpret and act—use masses of processing power and have started to run up huge bills. As they proliferate, the problem will grow. Big companies, the executive points out, typically use hundreds of software programs. If each of those offer agents (as they probably will), AI costs could easily spiral out of control.

Budget management is a new worry for AI adopters. Not long ago employees were encouraged to binge on the technology, as bosses and investors saw spending as a sign of innovation. Burning through vast numbers of tokens—the chunks of text that models process, which are often used as a unit of pricing—became a badge of honour; techies dubbed it “tokenmaxxing”. Companies showed off staff’s AI use on internal leaderboards. Meta’s display awarded top users titles like “Token Legend”.

Such incentives partly explain the boom in AI spending. Another contributing factor is a change in the way enterprises use the technology. Token-heavy applications, such as reasoning models and agents, are growing more popular. In some cases agents build their own agents, sending costs higher still. Ramp, a corporate-credit-card provider, analyses its clients’ transaction data to shed light on how they use AI. It reckons their overall spending has risen 13-fold in the past year. In April Uber said that it had already spent its annual AI budget in four months. Other firms are experiencing similar problems. One reportedly spent $500m on AI tokens in a month. Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, has described mounting customer costs as “a huge issue”.

For now, the problem is concentrated. The top spenders tend to be tech firms….

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Burning through vast numbers of tokens—the chunks of text that models process, which are often used as a unit of pricing—was once a badge of honour. Now budget management is a worry for AI adopters https://t.co/TZsf1H2BHC

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) June 16, 2026