Coinbase halved its AI spend while token usage kept growing exponentially. CEO Brian Armstrong posted the breakdown on X this week — five concrete levers, no access caps, and 91% of engineers never hit the old usage limits.
That last point matters. This isn't a story about restricting developers. It's a story about routing smarter.
"We're experimenting with defaulting to open weight GLM 5.2 and Kimi 2.7 through our LLM gateway, while still encouraging engineers to choose the right model for the task."
— Brian Armstrong, CEO Coinbase
What actually changed
