Why it matters
Spend is outrunning output. Fortune cites one firm whose Anthropic bill leapt from $20k in December toward $1M in July — 50x in seven months — plus Amazon's reported $500M single-month loss as agents burned tokens with little to show.
Tokenmaxxing read
The bottleneck is management, not model price. Sivulka reckons only 1 in 100 employees can hand AI usable context. The remedy the piece lands on is routing: cheaper models for routine turns, frontier models saved for core work.
Source takeaway
UBS now calls token-cost anxiety a real concern for around 60% of organizations. The through-line: without sharper instructions and routing discipline, extra tokens buy more agent looping, not more productivity.
