Every new primitive eventually becomes a bill. Cloud taught us that with compute, storage, egress and GPU hours. Tokens are next, and the first team to hit the wall in public was Uber: their CTO reportedly said the company had exhausted its AI budget months into 2026, largely from coding-agent usage.
The instinct is to treat this as a budgeting problem. Set limits, build dashboards, make teams justify usage. Some of that is necessary and none of it touches the cause.
Here is the actual cause, and you can compute it yourself.
The arithmetic nobody runs before the invoice
Anthropic's published rates, as of August 2026 (per million tokens):
