Out of control: Here's how a company spent $500 million on AI in a single month

Artificial intelligence usage at a single company spiraled out of control and led to a half-billion-dollar bill, according to a recent report.

A consultant is sounding the alarm on what could become the norm for companies in the near future: paying for AI integration may not be all it is made out to be.

One token is equal to approximately four written characters in English text.

An AI consultant recently provided Axios with a stunning revelation that has sparked intrigue across the globe. According to the unnamed insider, one of the consultant's clients spent approximately $500 million in a single month on AI usage.

These costs reportedly piled up because the company failed to put usage limits on its employees who have AI licenses for the large language model Claude.

Anthropic, Claude's operator, has different pricing structures that go up to $25 per million tokens. This may seem low, but one token is equal to approximately four written characters in English text or "0.75 words," Anthropic says on its website.

This of course includes punctuation marks.

Token consumption can be quite heavy when it comes to documents. For example, a PDF costs ~125,000 tokens, a large document is ~25,000 tokens, and a webpage is listed at ~2,500 tokens.

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Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Images through Claude Vision are calculated using a formula based on picture size in pixels. The formula is width * height / 750.

For example, a YouTube thumbnail is 1280 × 720 pixels and would therefore cost about 1,229 tokens. While it might end up costing just under $5 to produce around 1,000 average-sized images, the high costs are believed to stem from the scale of employee usage as well as when Claude is used to code.

The unnamed company — which was described in a LinkedIn post as a U.S. corporation — reportedly gave employees unfettered access with zero spending caps or usage limits.

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Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Without any guardrails in place, a company that creates documents or webpages or even performs coding with AI could be passively spending tens of thousands of dollars.

One chief technology officer told Axios that employees had been using AI for some of the most trivial tasks, which included checking the weather. Token plans may not be as they seem and are not "all you can eat" buffets, the CTO said.

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