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For the past few years, there was only one buzz in the tech circles around the world – Artificial Intelligence (AI) is coming, it will eliminate human jobs and save companies billions of rupees. In the race to speed up work and increase profits, most tech companies around the world laid off their employees and left office work to AI robots and coding agents. But now a big and shocking change is being seen in the ground reality. The companies which till yesterday were celebrating AI as extremely economical, their budgets have now completely deteriorated. The monthly bills of the AI ​​agents who were hired after removing humans from the offices, have started becoming more than the total salary of the employees.

What is the real reason for rising AI bills?

Engineers and developers in tech companies are now using multiple AI coding agents simultaneously in the background to make work easier. Because of this, the consumption of ‘tokens’ is increasing very rapidly and the bills of companies are getting out of control.

Most AI systems charge on a ‘token’ basis. Whenever an AI agent writes code, fixes coding bugs, or reviews a heavy document, it uses these tokens. The problem increases when engineers activate multiple tasks simultaneously in the background, due to which tokens are continuously spent without even knowing.

• Nvidia Experience: Brian Catanzaro, Vice President of tech sector giant NVIDIA, has expressed concern over this situation, saying that the cost of running computers and AI for his team has now exceeded the cost of employees’ salaries.

New trend in tech companies: ‘Tokenmaxxing’

Amidst the growing craze of AI, developers and coding engineers Tokenmaxxing A new trend of name has started. This simply means that engineers are blindly spending lakhs of tokens every day to increase their productivity or to do new experiments.

• Bills are coming in crores: According to media reports, the one month AI bill of some heavy users has crossed $ 150,000 i.e. approximately Rs 1.25 crore. Max Linder, a software engineer from Stockholm, admitted that he spends more money than his total salary on the use of Claude AI alone.

• Uber’s budget fails: According to an internal report, Uber engineers used Anthropic’s cloud code so indiscriminately that the company’s entire AI budget for the year 2026 was exhausted much ahead of schedule.

AI code is being created indiscriminately in companies

Despite such huge expenditure, the use of AI in tech companies is not showing any sign of stopping. We can understand how much the scope of AI based coding has increased from the figures given below:

• Anthropic: Boris Cherny, head of the company’s cloud code, says that almost 100% of his company’s code is now being generated entirely by AI.

• Google & Microsoft: Even in these two big companies, about 25% of the new code is being created with the help of AI.

• Meta: Facebook’s parent company Meta has now started handing over the performance review (work evaluation) of its employees to AI.

Who is the real profit and what is the solution?

These rising bills of companies are making the select tech giants who create these AI tools money. These include companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft. In view of the increasing demand, these companies have now started increasing their prices and changing their billing methods. For example, Microsoft has started ‘usage based billing’ for its GitHub Copilot.

Jensen Huang’s unique idea: To control this uncontrolled expenditure, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang has made a practical and unique proposal. He has suggested that software engineers should be allotted a quota of ‘AI tokens’ equal to half of their base salary. This should be seen as a kind of incentive or allowance, so that engineers use the token responsibly within the prescribed limits.