OpenAI says some researchers are blowing through $7,000 in AI tokens every day – but it’s a price the company appears willing to pay

OpenAI has revealed details on how much staff are spending on AI, and some are blowing through significant sums on a daily basis.

In a recent blog post, the company said researchers now spend around $600 each day on AI tokens amidst a surge in agentic coding. Some, meanwhile, are using upwards of $7,000 worth of tokens per day.

According to OpenAI, the company has witnessed a significant uptick in token consumption rates over the last year, and daily workflows for individual researchers have changed drastically in parallel to this.

Indeed, researchers are shipping more code and “running more experiments” following an influx of agents.

“Over the course of this year, OpenAI researchers’ daily work has changed substantially,” the company wrote. “Researchers are using coding agents throughout the day (often in concurrent sessions) and total usage is rapidly increasing, outpacing growth among other OpenAI teams.”

“The ways researchers use agents are changing, too: agents are handling increasingly complex tasks, and succeeding at them more often. AI research is a complex process with many potential bottlenecks, so the overall pace of progress likely won’t keep pace with these specific metrics.”

OpenAI isn’t the only one spending big on AI

OpenAI said improvements to productivity and research progress showcase the benefits of AI agents. The eye-watering sums accrued by prolific users also come as enterprises globally contend with rising AI-related costs.

Trends such as tokenmaxxing, combined with the shift to consumption-based pricing (CPB) models, mean token costs have become a recurring pain point for businesses over the last 12 months.

Research from Gartner, for example, projected that token costs could exceed the average developer salary by 2028.

Luckily, prices are beginning to dip. Figures from the LLM Token Expenditure Index show prices hit over $2 per million tokens in June this year. As of 5 September this dipped to 99 cents per million.

That decrease will offer little solace to businesses that have been hit with exorbitant bills this year, however.

Uber revealed it blew through its entire annual AI budget in just four months after the company encouraged and incentivized staff to engage in ‘tokenmaxxing’ practices.

The ride hailing firm was forced to introduce spending caps for users in response.

As ITPro reported in late June, Accenture also ordered staff to stop using AI for basic tasks due to skyrocketing prices. The firm pushed back against token use by “non-engineers” who were driving excessive use for tasks such as converting PDFs to slides.

Optimization in the spotlight

While some OpenAI researchers might have carte blanche to spend on AI tokens, most enterprises don’t have that luxury, prompting a revival of traditional practices such as FinOps.

Speaking to ITPro in June, Nitish Tyagi, Senior Principal Analyst at Gartner, said IT leaders need to sharpen up on cost optimization processes to curtail potential costs.

Practices such as content engineering could help reduce costs, he noted. Enterprises should also establish a “use-case-driven decision” framework that outlines where and when AI should be used in everyday tasks.

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