Large artificial intelligence (AI) labs like Anthropic and OpenAI could see their growth impacted by AI users’ efforts to control costs, the Financial Times reported Thursday (June 18).
Companies are looking to better manage their use of AI after seeing the costs of the technology rise, according to the report.
The rising costs have been driven by the shift from chatbots to agents, which consume more computing power, as well as the AI labs’ move from flat subscriptions to token-based billing, per the report.
This has created an opening for Chinese AI labs that are able to charge less than the U.S. companies due to their more efficient models and China’s lower energy costs, the report said.
Chinese AI models now have greater token consumption than U.S. ones, which marks a change since the beginning of the year, the report said, citing data from OpenRouter.
Companies that encouraged their employees to use AI tools when the costs were lower are now using a variety of methods to cut back, according to the report.
Executives quoted in the article said their companies have introduced usage caps, tasked employees to use the right tool for each task, shared cost-saving ideas such as switching to models that are older and cheaper, and adopted open-source models.
PYMNTS reported in February that as enterprises accelerated their AI usage from pilot programs to production-scale deployments, they found that the commercial infrastructure underpinning traditional software-as-a-service (SaaS) doesn’t translate cleanly to AI.
Rather than charging per employee, AI charges per token, per application programming interface (API) call, per generated image, per inference cycle, per autonomous workflow executed in the background while no human is watching, or, in some cases, all of them simultaneously.
It was reported in May that Uber exhausted its full-year 2026 AI budget by April, leading executives to say that the company was “back to the drawing board” and that the productivity case had not closed.
On June 1, it was reported that Walmart limited employees’ AI usage amid rising demand. The company began offering a set number of tokens for each employee to use with its in-house AI agent Code Puppy. Before this, workers had an unlimited number of tokens.
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