Just to make things clear: API access to most models is charged per input tokens + output tokens. It means that the longer your conversation is, the more you pay for every new answer. Single prompt with no context and 100 tokens of answer is cheap. Single prompt with 100k tokens of context and 100 tokens of answer is NOT cheap.
Extremely long conversations with most expensive top of the line models can absolutely demolish your budget.
The more recent report says corporate AI adoption has found several issues with AI, with human workers turning to automating dreary and mundane tasks they don’t like doing, rather than valuable or meaningful work.
Thank god we have consulting companies to tell us what humans like!
Maybe AI will finally negatively impact some CEO jobs.
> Be a corporate executive
> Tell your employees to use more AI in their worlflows
> Punish employees who don’t use enough AI, while rewarding those who use it the most, irrespective of actual outcomes
> Be shocked when your company blows through an absurd amount of tokens in one month
I just want to know what are the best things to type into these ai chat boxes that will cost the most. If my company wants me to use this garbage then I want to make it as expensive as possible and when their liscenses need to be repurchased I want it to be as expensive as possible to continue to force this garbage on us
Edit. Hey everyone lots of great replies here, please keep the suggestions, fixes, corrections etc coming!
These high prices are not from people talking to chatbots.
They’re using agentic tools where their prompt spawns a lot of bots which talk to themselves/the other bots and they keep going until someone (usually a higher quality reasoning model) decides that they’ve met the goals of the task that they were assigned.
So instead of 1 prompt and 1 response, you get 1 prompt and 800 responses across 5 different bots each using really large context windows.
So to answer his question how do you make that happen? What do you ask to prompt these bots to be spawned?
you don’t get this to happen by just talking to any chatbot and asking for agents. you have to specifically use “agentic” tools (usually costs money to use)
Well I can apparently create agents so how can I make the most inefficient agent possible?
Something along the lines of “Read the wikipedia page of the day. Verify every single link and the context matter against all files in this computer. Then trace their correlations to each other, showing which link corresponded to most files by subject matter, after that is done, verify your work by doing the same from different starting points. We expect similar results. After 100 rounds of that, it should be good. Then you should create a DB to store all that data (only after you ran the full 100 verificaritions yourself) and reverify every field against the pages and the files”
That should keep it going for an hour. Turn on fast mode and auto mode (if using claude) for extra costs.
Every page and file will increase its context, burning tokens
I may or may not be getting access to claude soon …
If you need some plausible deniability about it being real work and not just obviously you running up costs:
Feed it a bunch of work-related documentation and then have it do a bunch of reviews of the content on that documentation.
you would be mostly burning your own money if you did this, so I wouldn’t recommend it (depends on how the agent is priced)
I’m not using my money for any of this…
Just attach a bunch of text files, you’ll blow through tokens quickly
Input tokens are cheap. Output tokens are the thing that really costs money. There is a Claude extension called caveman that tries to save tokens by making it use shorter sentences with less words. So if you want to waste money, do the opposite - ask it to use lengthy sentences with as much words as possible.
Also - some words amount to multiple tokens. I don’t know what the rules are exactly, but I’m assuming that more complex and uncommon words are worth more tokens - and thus waste more money.
What’s funnier is that typically the AI providers lose money on every query their customers make. So, this may have cost some company $500m to Anthropic, but it cost Anthropic a whole lot more than that.
What a brilliant business model.
They make it up in volume.
(Volume being how much they shout about how it’s going to change the world and dupe more people into investing.)
Oh, it’s changing the world alright. It’s burning more resources than just finding some skilled people. It guzzles water and electricity and whatever it cost to make those wafers.
So, not a net positive since at some point, this may become a hellscape.
When you owe Claude half a million, you’ve got a problem.
When you owe Claude half a billion, Anthropic has a problem
It’s probably Amazon. They can absolutely afford it.
Either I have some inside knowledge of that exact thing happening and I know the company (not saying who) or this is probably a common things that happened to a lot of major companies (more likely). To be fair, I do not have privy on how far it went and how much it cost before they realize the problem, and it may not have been this much. Which further suggests it’s a thing everywhere.
Most companies can’t eat a half billion dollar loss so who ends up paying this? AI queries burn actual energy so the AI company would have to charge I would think.
Most companies can’t eat a half billion dollar loss so who ends up paying this?
Taxpaying proles will foot the bill somehow.
I’ll cover it, but only this once. Let’s not make this a habit.
But if we are to uncritically believe what the AI peddlers told us, that means this mystery company should be reaping $10 billion in additional revenue or quantifiable gains in productivity!
Claude yearns for the mines
Big companies license Copilot for less than 25 usd/month per seat. Don’t tell me it covers the ops cost, even for mixed calc.
Depends how big the model is. Smaller models can be dirt cheap.
Im June they are switching Copilot to metered usage . People are going to be out of credits on the third day.
My company has let us get Enterprise Copilot and has been pushing us all to “use AI”. So, I now use it as a a semi-functional search for SharePoint/Outlook/Files on an almost daily basis. I also ask it questions about Microsoft documentation on a regular basis. I wonder how long it’s going to be until they yank my license.
Apparently they’ll notice when you reach half a billion dollars
Only if they actually use it
Yeah my 0365 shoves it in the users faces, they ask it for some stuff until the honeymoon is over then all of a sudden it shits the bed when you try to make more than 2 images a day or plan a small project.
I’m sure they will sweep stuff like this under the rug, for now… This is not the first, nor the last company this will happen to.
In other news, company says unexpected expenses in its technology segment are driving layoffs and site closures. Company CEO said in an interview with Forbes, “There’s no way we could have predicted this challenge. In service to our customers and our shareholders we’re right sizing our operations and reevaluating our strategic priorities. We’ll continue to focus on creating value while being a leader in our industry and accelerating AI adoption in everything we do.”
“there’s no way we could of predicted the thing we were warned about”
“We’re going to continue to push trash untill the shareholders are happy”
Then the end with its “Go fuck yourself, were pushing it all anyways”
…we’re right sizing our operations and reevaluating our strategic priorities. We’ll continue to focus on creating value while being a leader in our industry and accelerating AI adoption in everything we do.
That’s a lot of words for the CFO to say none of the C-suite knows what they’re doing and should be removed from their position for failing to meet shareholder objectives.
Ugh that reads like it came from a random business sentence generator
By “random business sentence generator” do you mean a language model? 👀
A CEO.
same thing
“right sizing” is pretty offensive term, more like “exec incompetence”
Wow - if that quote is real, that is the most corpo-speak word salad bunch of nonsense I’ve ever read. It’s got literally every big-biz exec and manager cliche in there, all strung together.
There are 12 mentions of the “report” and yet not a single link to the source of any report.
Anecdotally, my job trained every office employee on AI tools back in March, encouraging everyone to think of ways to incorporate the tools into their standard work. As of last week, they’re asking us to get prior authorization to use their AI portal as a way to limit requests.
So some Fortune 500s must be feeling the squeeze on AI.
Hi, it’s partly my fault. You’re welcome. Boss said use more AI. Boss’s mistake was asking someone who would actually take him seriously, unlike all the koolaid chugs out there. Made a docker runtime harness that hooks up to Snowflake Cortex Code SDK for inference. Supports defining repeatable LLM tasks, scheduling them, lightly orchestrating them, network controls, saving results, … It’s got support for custom skills, commands, chain prompting, sessions, … So now I can use Docker to schedule LLM jobs like motherfucking database pipelines. It can mediocrely do shit like research, planning, evaluations, … all defined through YAML configuration files.
Basically, I introduced scalability to the stack. Sweet malicious compliance. We’ll see what happens next, when everyone is actually empowered to use AI like the execs want. My prediction is an about-face.
Edit: sometimes the best way to win a fight is to show the referee that the rules don’t make any fucking sense. Sometimes the referee doesn’t speak English, though, so you have to show them via USD speak. Sometimes they have a hard time hearing too, so you have to let them taste the poison a little. Sometimes they get drunk off that little bit, so you then gotta throw them in the fucking pool and tell them to start swimming.
yep. everyone at mine was being praised for creating an agent that turned meetings into JSON and then the JSON into Asana tasks and the Asana tasks into a report and the report into an internal and external email and the email into a slack message and the slack messages and emails into weekly summary.
Burning thousands of credits for what could be replaced by…
listening
All that and you know for a fact no one’s reading any of that crap. I hate that working as an adult involves working with spineless losers who would rather participate in this clown show than call it out, because being real gets you punished
The only thing companies aren’t willing to pay is attention
I created a PoC to have an event parse an employees emails, summarize them, then check the calendar and recommend meetings and follow up based on context. It ended up working okay, but it was such a waste of time. This was a C Suite employee that requested, who gets a high volume of junk email. Why would you want AI to (initially requested) auto create meetings for you? That sounds like my nightmare. In the end, it never hit prod thankfully, but, the dev work to get to where I did was awful. Developing AI agents is like guessing and checking until you get close enough. Debugging is brutal and the work is extremely uninspiring.
I was put in a position to start building and deploying copilot agents in our company. I discovered in the first day how unprepared our environment was for anything copilot. The default state when you get licenses and an environment to work in, is the wild west. It’s really bad and as is tradition, half cocked and rushed to market. I wrote out pages of notes of things we had to do as a company before even the most simple agents are created for security and governance. I never got the support to implement any changes, so I drug my feet as much as I could on anything I could. For 6 months I successfully never deployed any AI stuff and got out to do full stack dev instead. I created PoC agents, but with hard caveats that none of it was usable in the current state in prod.
Now prices are increasing and our drive to force agentic has softened a little company wide. I like to think that my semi malicious yet justified slow walking saved us a whole shit load of headache and expenses over the next couple of months as the new copilot pricing hits on June 1.
Christ I am only realising now they probably see me asking copilot “why are you so shit” or “Just fuckoff, I’ll do it myself”. They pay for that.
Love to see reality setting in.
Unfortunately that reality is going to quickly turn to “we have to cut staff and freeze salaries this year due to AI spending”.
Now that they’ve poured zillions into it, they are starting to realize that they’ll never get their return on that investment, so now they have to manage the draw down so it doesn’t all crash.
At least some are recognizing it.
The ‘report’ is the first linked axios article, and the headline is just a bullet point in it
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-costs
An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees.
The problem, as indirectly noted in the article, is that they’re using the white house as a source, which isn’t reliable in the slightest anymore, and the article explicitly noted that the white house is using them for market manipulation.
Axios is a convenient punching bag for this administration’s blatant insider trading and market manipulation. No wonder hacks like Greene and Kinzinger are blaming the messenger, and conveniently not going after the trump admin when they all have a common enemy.
Ah, my mistake. I didn’t see the link.
