The token bill comes due: Inside the industry scramble to manage AI’s runaway costs

Gordon expects frontier labs and other model providers to adopt OpenRouter-style optimization to drive queries to the cheapest models — a trend already showing up on enterprise Claude bills. 

“The financial report for how much you spend on Anthropic, even if you call the Opus model, some of the spend will be on Sonnet or Haiku, because they are smart enough to do it,” Gordon said. “I think this will become more and more of a thing.”

But all these tools are being built without a common language or shared definitions for how much a token costs, what it produces, and how to compare spend across vendors. That’s where the Tokenomics Foundation hopes to prove useful.

The Foundation is building a canonical definition and framework for “tokenomics;” open standards, specifications and metrics for AI token usage and billing; as well as new metrics for AI economics, like cost-per-intelligence or tokens-per-watt. It also plans to define metrics across token factory effectiveness and consumption efficiency. The group is planning a formal launch in July, and is about to announce more members at the FinOps X conference next week. 

“Token economics is fundamentally more abstract and opaque than anything we’ve managed at this scale before,” Nishant Gupta, chief availability officer at Salesforce, said in a statement. “It requires a different operational muscle than the one the industry built for cloud.”

That said, Goldman Sachs projects global token usage to multiply by 24 times by 2030. The companies already over budget need solutions now, and the foundation’s first deliverable is still months away.

“Maybe we created a steam engine, but we still haven’t figured out the assembly line,” said Gordon.

According to Arcolano, the smart move is broad, moderate adoption. 

“The best ROI comes from moving the broad middle from low to moderate usage, not pushing heavy users higher,” he said.

Russell Brandom and Tim Fernholz contributed to this reporting.