Eight days ago it was Palantir's Alex Karp going ballistic on live television about the "effing insane" economics of renting intelligence by the token. On Thursday it was Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora's turn, and while his delivery was calmer, his number was not: Arora told CNBC that AI token prices need to fall as much as 90% before enterprise adoption can actually scale.So the chief executive of one of the largest cybersecurity companies in the world - that buys this stuff at industrial scale - telling the frontier labs, on their favorite network, that their pricing model is broken by roughly an order of magnitude.90% Or BustArora wants token costs at roughly one-fifth of current levels within the next 12 months, and down 90% by the year after that. Arora joins a growing list of executives - Karp most loudly among them - calling out runaway token costs, and that the bill shock is already pushing corporate buyers toward cheaper open-weight alternatives, including Chinese models that are rapidly closing the capability gap with the American labs. Regular readers will recognize that migration: we have documented Coinbase cutting its internal AI spend nearly in half by defaulting engineers to Chinese open-weight models, Microsoft weighing a hosted DeepSeek variant for its own agentic tools, and OpenRouter data showing Chinese models capturing - in some periods - north of 60% of global token consumption among top models.Palo Alto CEO Arora says AI pricing needs to fall 90% as token costs skyrocket | Samantha Subin, CNBC