I’m confused. I thought employers loved AI and it was the future.
They love money. AI was good money for a while. Or at least it looked like good money until you looked at it for longer than 3 seconds, which greatly surpasses the average attention span of an executive. And also the average executive’s iq.
They loved it too much and now it costs more than paying a living wage to a human being. The end goal of AI was always to cut cost and layoff people. The best sabotage right now is to setup a script that constantly prompts an LLM for something useless. I would recommend it if it didn’t waste so much energy and clean water. But it would send a message. AI is not cheaper, it never was. Even with today’s outrageous token prices, LLM companies are still bleeding money per user. It will only get more expensive as data center contracts fall through and the investment craze fizzles out.
the AI companies are hoping the ones buying the LLM subscriptions to be the suckers and losers.
I would recommend it if it didn’t waste so much energy and clean water.
I wouldn’t. It’s not possible to do meaningful validation of a process that has AI in the loop because it is not repeatable and there is no reliable explainability. So for anything where money or lives are at stake, it’s not worth a shit. Same goes for anything where the company is held liable for false statements.
I meant as a means of corporate sabotage.
Mixed bag.
There are legitimately high value problems that AI works well against. But ungoverned proliferation has a net negative ROI across complex and difficult to measure areas.
When applied expertly, it works great. When blindly handed to your entire workforce as a panacea, not so much
Someone’s been reading the HR posters.
This is actually how the bubble begins to pop, we’re seeing it happen now.
…said every day now for a year
So it has a negative ROI and anyone who brought it into their firm is a clueless twat who uncritically bought a sales pitch.
If corporate governance were not a joke, C-level heads would roll.
All over America, employees are saying “But YOU said…”
Uplifting News
My company recently converted our PMs into Vine Engineers right after laying off actual engineers. They don’t even know what git is or how to use it. 3 of them alone are using $7k a month in Claude tokens and they have not raised so much as a single PR.
Who needs PRs? What’s a branch? It defaults to master and that seems to work just fine!
I don’t really understand how people are using so many tokens. At work I haven’t even hit $200 I spend per month. Wtf are people doing with these things that burns so many tokens?
If you run “agentic coding harness” or any kind of goal oriented loop then tokens goe brrrr.
And LLM sellers are pushing for that (duh), as they managed to convince people to use infinite monkeys typewriting until they make Hamled.
(Type made on purpose)
I do it on purpose
Some companies had leaderboards and encouraged AI usage until they got their bills.
A big context costs a lot more
I tried Warp terminal because now that’s bankrolled by openai’s magic infinite money you can use your own openai api keys without a subscription. So I put one from my work account. I do a git commit (manually) and then it comes a prompt under it “push it, open a PR and switch to main?”. I click yes, it used one million tokens for that… (And it took about a minute because it did like 20 requests, so there was no time saving at all vs doing it manually)
I wget something, it comes a prompt under it “now compare the hash?”. Boom, another 500k tokens
That’s completely insane. At best it would be useful for the pr title and message, but the rest of that is waste.
These are the kinds of things I just ask in chat. “Whata the cli command to compare hashes again?”
People who use slop generators for coding assistance are insane. Everything else is a logical consequence of thinking you can take shortcuts to coding.
If you click the most expensive model and then click max/fast mode, the same task can easily cost 10 or 20x of the cheaper models
I watched two colleagues this week and both had Opus 4.8 1M max thinking. No matter which task. It’s also slow as fuck. I work almost all day with GPT-5.4 low thinking and get good results… but faster and cheaper.
I guess good model selection and promoting will be what sets devs apart in the near future. Once that bubble bursts a bit more and prices increase further that will be an interesting reckoning. Also for companies who basically taunted their employees into tokenmaxxing.
Agent loops for SWE burn a LOT of tokens.
I’m unfortunately temporarily disabled and can’t use my hands for another 2 months. So I’ve leaned heavily into AI based workflows to keep my job in the meantime.
Aside from the nightmare of keeping quality high, not atrophying skills, and avoiding a lack of domain knowledge. It works reasonably okay.
Token usage is insane though. A productive day might cost a few hundred dollars in tokens all things considered. Quality is expensive as well, a good 1/4 of that are automated systems that exist to identify defects, quality, coherence…etc issues early.
I am not able to use the tokens provided by a Claude Max account either.
But if someone tries to be clever and have 10 employees use a single Max account, they probably run into the limits often. And if the response is to let them just buy API-prized tokens instead of getting more accounts, that gets very expensive very fast. The single-user accounts are subsidized. The extra token prices are not.
Actual business accounts are prohibitively expensive. And at least Anthropic terminates subsidized accounts when they see extensive use.Real token prices are insane. Most businesses couldn’t afford them. And eventually the VC capital will dry up. The cheap AI bubble will burst. And then the market is in for a real sticker shock.
Better be prepared to switch to local inference for as many use cases as possible.I read they were automating everything whether it needed AI or not just to get credit for using AI.
I had to push back on that at work. Most of the problems presented were easily solvable via conventional methods. Only one task was a legitimate use of AI. There are some others, but the pressure to consider AI for every task is a little bananas
My boss was talking about using AI agents for CI/CD processes. Like, I get using them to build CI/CD processes, but involving AI agents in the actual build process is ridiculously stupid. A representative from Microsoft specifically said in a training session to not use them that way so it’s obviously not only my stupid ass boss.
involving AI agents in the actual build process is ridiculously stupid
The very notion instills fear and disgust.
Only nerds want idempotent build results, it’s so fun debugging slop…
I’ve heard “loops” will burn a lot of tokens. Haven’t tried it myself. A person could also spool up multiple loops to work on multiple branches at the same time.
I am not convinced yet of letting agents completely unattended. Watching them work makes review easier for me. If I let the agent just produce some result it needed half an hour (or more) for, it’s very likely so convoluted that I can at best skim over it and then go „yeah yeah ok, it’s probably fine <merge>“.
If I let the agent just produce some result it needed half an hour (or more) for, it’s very likely so convoluted that I can at best skim over it and then go „yeah yeah ok, it’s probably fine <merge>“.
I am seeing the first job ads for senior software developers which can debug the resulting mess. A lot of it will be just unmaintenable. They will get 20 years of technical debt with ten times the speed and ten times the volume.
3-6 active sessions on different work trees isn’t unheard of either
What are you using? Which product? I got 2k last month and was told to use cheaper models indeed
I generally use sonnet 4.6, switching to opus 4.6 for more complex stuff. I try to stick with medium thinking, but will use max for stuff I am not super specific about in my prompt (or obscure errors).
I use them through a GitHub copilot enterprise license, via the plugin for jetbrains.
Our company pays by token usage.
Claude opus 4.5 costs about 25$ per one million input tokens.
Well I manage to get to about 50 million input tokens per day regularly on the agent. Not everyday, but at least 7 per month. So I am alone cost the company about 2000$ extra on top of my salary.
Well they fixed it by implementing some great caching for the tokens and using sonnet instead of opus I can save some money too. Also gemini flash is much cheaper and similar performant. So you can fix it so you don’t burn money on ai
We are moving to open router, models like glm 5.2 are way cheaper
Some CEO guy said employees must evolve. Throttle your workloads even more employees. Transcend! Praise be to the AI overlord(s)!
A sign of the times? Possible lead in the bubble popping?
AI bubble popping is that gif of the crash test truck.
No clue what you mean.
Wait for it.
The first half of the title got me worried…
Exactly. 😆
Ironic
For anyone who actually wants to read the article:
Edit, here is the article since people have been having issues:
Companies Are Throttling Employees’ AI Use Because It’s Too Expensive
Jul 2, 2026 at 6:00 AM
Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash and collage by 404 Media with company logos.
Companies across tech, entertainment, banking, and many other industries are throttling their employees’ use of AI and pleading with workers to use less powerful models to stop AI costs from spiraling out of control, according to leaked Slack chats, screenshots of internal dashboards, emails, and more material obtained by 404 Media from half a dozen companies including Atlassian, Adobe, and Amazon. In at least one case, AI spending has tripled to more than $15 million a month.
The news shows the looming fallout from companies adopting AI as quickly as possible, and AI providers’ moves to charge enterprises based on how much they use AI rather than a flat fee. Emails obtained by 404 Media even show some companies cutting off access to some AI models altogether in an attempt to stop burning through their AI tokens, and big tech companies like Adobe are ending unlimited access to Claude.
“A lot of people had ideas about how to adjust workflows with lower-reasoning models for certain tasks in order to mitigate token consumption,” an Adobe employee told 404 Media. “But I am not sure that they fully absorbed the news, and I’m not sure the full ramifications are going to be clear to everyone until it goes into effect.” 404 Media granted multiple employees at companies using AI anonymity because they weren’t permitted to speak to the press.
Citi, for example, has shut off access to Claude’s and ChatGPT’s latest models entirely, according to an internal Citi email obtained by 404 Media. That includes Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7, and GPT-5.5.
💡
Do you know anything else about token spend inside companies? We would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message Joseph securely on Signal at joseph.404 or Emanuel at emanuel.404
“These models consume significantly more AI Credits per interaction and have been the primary driver of elevated enterprise consumption,” the email reads. The email says Citi disabled the models on June 24 and plans to re-enable them on July 1.
Before shutting off access, Citi sent employees another email asking them to not use the more powerful models unless they absolutely had to.
“⚠️ Action needed: Choose the right model for the task (reduce Opus 4.7),” one section of the email reads, referring to one of Claude’s more recent, and token hungry, models. Since AI tokens are now pooled across Citi, the email says, developers with heavier AI-assisted workflows draw more from the shared pools, while lighter users ideally contribute their unused portion, freeing it up for the developers who may need their tokens. “We need everyone to be intentional about model selection to ensure fair access for all users across the enterprise.”
The email points again to Opus 4.7, saying, “Every interaction with Opus 4.7 (and other models in its class such as GPT 5.5) consumes significantly more credits than standard or mid-tier models.” It then provides a breakdown of what Citi employees should use each model for: GPT-5.3-Codex for quick questions, explanations, or simple code generation; the same model or Claude Sonnet 4.6 for code review and “standard chat;” then higher models like Claude Sonnet 4.6 for “architectural reasoning.”
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Citi’s changes come directly in response to GitHub moving from a flat subscription model to a usage-based billing one in June, according to the email. The email says Citi is also monitoring daily Copilot usage to find “excessive or anomalous usage patterns early” and has budget controls in place. Citi told 404 Media it has not disabled models and the company is not taking steps to curb usage by allocating workers a certain number of AI tokens. This is despite the email and other screenshots clearly showing Citi blocking access to certain models.
Atlassian, the company behind the popular software product development tool Jira, recently ended unlimited use of AI tools at the company and introduced a dashboard where employees can track how much their AI use costs the company. 404 Media has seen the dashboard, which shows Atlassian went from spending $5 million on things like AWS, Google Cloud, and OpenAI LLMs in the month of August 2025, to more than $15 million in May 2026. The company is on track to spend more than $120 million on AI tools for the fiscal year, the dashboard shows. Atlassian told 404 Media these numbers don’t accurately reflect its AI usage, but declined to say which of the figures were wrong and how.
“I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that they changed their workflow to maximize AI usage, and now they can run out in 2-3 days, especially when using agents or similar or using the latest Claude model. Lots of angsty messages in Slack like ‘now how do I do my job,’” an Atlassian employee told us. “For what it’s worth I think it’s insane they were allowing huge amounts of spending on it before, it was only a matter of time before that had to end.”
Inside GitHub things are a bit different. Employees don’t have a limit on token spend, but workers were recently told the company is looking into decreasing token spend by using open source models, a GitHub employee said. The employee told us that GitHub plans to test user-based billing, meaning budgeting AI tool use to individual people instead of teams, projects, or unlimited usage.
At Adobe, unlimited Claude access is not being renewed and will expire on June 30, an Adobe employee said. Workers there were told instead, in essence, try to get everything you can done before that date.
As 404 Media previously reported, Amazon recently shut down an internal company leaderboard which ranked employees based on how much they used AI tools at work. Multiple Amazon employees told us they suspect Amazon shut down the leaderboard because it was encouraging wasteful and expensive AI usage. After Amazon shut down the leaderboard, 404 Media saw a discussion on Amazon’s internal Slack where an employee shared a screenshot showing they had hit a token limit employees seemingly didn’t know existed previously.
“Crazy, we go from no more leaderboard to actual usage limits in two weeks,” one Amazon employee said in a reply on Slack.
An Amazon spokesperson told 404 Media in an email “We encourage employees to use and experiment with AI, and our guidance around AI usage hasn’t changed.”
Other companies have burned through their AI tokens. An employee at an entertainment company told 404 Media, “We hit our limit for ChatGPT token use this month for the first time. One developer used almost half the entire company’s allocated pool with no obvious ROI [return on investment].”
Last week 404 Media reported consulting giant Accenture found that much token usage, or ‘chewing,’ is not from supercharged engineers creating lots of code, but people converting PDFs into presentation slides. Accenture is seeing “soaring token spend” among its clients, according to leaked audio 404 Media obtained.
There is an obvious irony—or cold calculation—in Accenture pointing this out. In the audio, senior Accenture staff explained they told their clients to adopt AI as quickly as possible. Now that AI costs have skyrocketed or become unpredictable, Accenture is positioning itself also as the solution to that problem, with one of the employees saying Accenture has a new opportunity regarding its clients: “to really think about token economics.”
Accenture continues to use AI internally for trivial projects, though. Screenshots obtained by 404 Media show an internal tool that lets employees predict which team will win the World Cup. The tool was made with AI, a source with knowledge of the tool said.
“They are still trying to ram AI down our throats at all levels and areas of work,” the source said. “Everyone seems to be trying to outdo each other in finding new ways to waste water and no one is telling us to slow down.”
Adobe, GitHub, and Accenture did not respond to requests for comment.
Doesn’t work
Huh, weird, tried it like 3 times just now and it worked. Maybe archive.is in unreachable from where you are
They use the captcha page to ddos Wikipedia so for some people it just keeps looping
Can you post a PDF of the article?
Posted the entire thing in my original comment
Many thanks!
Im self-employed, and my employer has no idea what they’d do with AI, so it’s not an issue for me.
I thought a token was a credit for an inquiry, but from reading about this, I’m getting the idea that a token is a word or phrase that forms the prompt for the AI to respond to. So a single prompt could cost multiple tokens if there are multiple words or phrases. Further, since the more parameters you give the AI, the more likely you’ll get a decent response, so a good prompt may cost a lot of tokens. Is that correct?
If so, then using more tokens to get a better response is likely to be a more efficient use, than multiple inquiries with mediocre results. But now we seem to be entering a era where they are more focused on the costs than the results, which is always stupid.
For a buncha geniuses, this AI stuff all seems pretty fucked up. Nobody seems to know what they’re doing, or even what they want out of it, but they’re spending literal fortunes on it. A scenario like that will NEVER have a good outcome.
I been using open models for 100% of my coding. 1/2 of the time I’m using local open models like qwen 3.6 or Dwarfstar if it’s sensitive code I don’t want the internet learning from.
I don’t miss using frontier models at all. GLM5.2 and Deepseek V4 pro are both equal or beats sonnet. I haven’t had to use Opus for awhile now.
Cool story, bot.
Lol. Lmao even. Rofl perhaps.
It’s just a special case of TANSTAAFL.
But it stops clearly short of roflmao, I infer?
It shouldn’t
The roflcopter has left the pad. No sleep til LOLWTFBBQ
Lol with the fucking barbecue ?
pipe down young’n
Kids these days don’t even understand trout slapping. SMH
Roflcopter?
Roflcopter?
Hey hey hey hey hey whoa whoa let’s just keep the big guns in reserve for now, ok?
Ai bubble burst will be the time.
Too bad it’s going to hurt so many people too
Albuquerque New Mexico…
IYKYK
Albuquerque New Mexico period period period exclamation mark