Scoop from Madison Mills at Axios, reinforcing what I said here the other day:
This is bad news for the AI industry, and fits well with what I warned about on Tuesday, adding in particular to the concerns from there that I circled below:
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One big reason why Anthropic is having a blowout quarter (aside from the massive one time subsidy that they got from SpaceX) is that companies have been “tokenmaxxing” for the last few months, encouraging employees to use GenAI as much possible, without much regard to payoff. That means lots of short-term revenue to Anthropic and OpenAI, but it never seemed like a sustainable idea to me:
Gary Marcus, MIT PhD and NYU Professor Emeritus@GaryMarcus
Tokenmaxxing is stupid. Change my mind?
12:27 AM · May 1, 2026 · 9.15K Views
46 Replies · 2 Reposts · 111 Likes
A month later, it already looks like the moment has passed; tokenmaxxing may have jacked up Anthropic’s second quarter, but it looks like it won’t last. Nobody is going to be comfortable accidentally burning half a billions of tokens in month. Budgets will tighten, especially when people realize just how costly agents (which burn orders of magnitudes more tokens) are.
Axios quotes Ali Ansari, CEO of a model training firm known as Micro1, as saying “The enterprise is undergoing a "healthy swing" away from AI overuse — or "tokenmaxxing," the push to burn as many AI tokens as possible” – which means less revenue for Anthropic and others. Or lower prices and even more challenges in being profitable.
Consistent with the Axios quote, and the Uber concern’s I expressed a couple days ago, I am seeing more and more reports online like this:
Karthik Hariharan@hkarthik
The same conversation is happening across tech right now and many of us saw it coming. Tokens got burned for millions of dollars without any real significant ROI to show for it. The largest accounts with OpenAI and Anthropic subs have FDEs being thrown at them to retain the
Ed Zitron @edzitron
Uber’s COO has said that it’s getting “harder to justify” its AI costs because there was no way to show a link between AI spend and any meaningful increase in useful features. This is the first time I’ve seen a company say this directly. https://t.co/xUhZvtpwah
4:59 PM · May 26, 2026 · 80.4K Views
41 Replies · 31 Reposts · 360 Likes
The second sentence— “Tokens got burned for millions of dollars without any real significant ROI to show for it” – might well turn out to be the epitaph for an era.
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Just imagine what might happen to the economy and people’s retirement funds if these projections from FT are correct:
Yoshik@AskYoshik
The AI numbers are starting to look very ugly. Even under "best case" assumptions, FT's own data shows Microsoft AI ROI at -9%, Google at -15%, Meta at -28%, Oracle at -35%. Only Amazon barely comes out positive. This is exactly why I keep comparing this to the dot-com era.
4:08 AM · May 28, 2026 · 97.3K Views
109 Replies · 340 Reposts · 1.46K Likes
And it could get worse, if tokenmaxxing is indeed a fad whose time has already begun to pass.
Brace for bailouts.