The latest ‘crack in the thesis’ for the trillion-dollar AI boom: Tokens are getting cheaper

https://fortune.com/2026/09/09/ai-compute-tokens-cheaper-boom/





That’s according to new data from Ramp, the corporate spending platform, published Wednesday, showing the effective price that American businesses pay per a million tokens has fallen about 41% from its peak in March, from $1.15 to 68 cents. The share of usage going to frontier models is dropping, too; about 53% in early August to 45% by September. And the top 1% of spenders, the cohort that drives about 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic’s enterprise revenue, cut per-employee spend by nearly 10% in August.

It’s not a disaster or the bubble bursting but it is a “crack in the AI thesis,” Ara Khazarian, the Ramp chief economist who runs the Index, told Fortune. Rather than unleashing a gush of demand for the best models, tokens are starting to be priced more like a commodity– as interchangeable as salt or wheat. And commodity owners aren’t valued at $2 trillion. Morgan Stanley has flagged vulnerability for up to $300 billion in bonds financing neocloud buildouts—CoreWeave-style companies that borrowed to build data centers before signing tenants—if token prices don’t keep up.
Ramp isn’t the only one flagging the trend. Citadel Securities noted in June that a separate measure, Silicon Data’s LLM Expenditure Index, started to fall because of a “bifurcation” between frontier AI, concentrated among the few tech-heavy firms that can afford it, and the “everyday” AI the rest of the economy runs on.
“You have multiple metrics now starting to move in a negative direction,” Kharazian said.
He said that the price decline reflects a mix of labs being forced to cut prices—OpenAI slashed the cost of its GPT-5.6 Luna model by 80%, and Anthropic announced its own cuts last month—and customers trading down to cheaper and simpler models. Which makes it threatening, he added, to anyone “who’s expecting a full dream scenario where the AI companies grow with nothing curbing their enthusiasm.”
That was the mood in the Spring, as “tokenmaxxing” entered the tech lexicon, the media told stories of token-usage dashboards and Nvidia’s Huang insisted a $500,000 engineer should burn $250,000 a year in tokens. But by the summer, cost discipline set in; Amazon and Meta killed its own leaderboards in May, while Microsoft cancelled Claude Code subscriptions. Khazarian said he’s now hearing the opposite of tokenmaxxing from businesses: companies are imposing defaults that steer employees away from frontier models entirely.

Arnaud Bertrand

@RnaudBertrand
As is sadly often the case from Indian media - which is a big problem - this is completely fake news.

Here's the actual Bain study (bain.com/insights/from-…): it's four years old, puts India third in the world (behind the US and China), and says nothing about China having 12%.

It also measures **quantity** of AI talent, not **quality**, and quality is where India lags most. When measured on quality of talent, Carnegie just released a study that ranked India extremely poorly with only 4% of top AI talents at the undergraduate level (and even less at more advanced career stages), more than an order of magnitude behind China at 57.4% (carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/…).

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2103746655237624257?s=20

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India Plus
@india_plus_
🚨 India overtakes China in global AI talent, taking a 16% share versus China’s 12%. 

(Bain & Company)

https://x.com/india_plus_/status/2102978836069851286?s=20

Gates Foundation Pledges $1 Billion to Combat A.I. Inequality - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/15/technology/bill-gates-ai-foundat...

The funding will be used to support A.I. projects in health care, agriculture and education, and to develop data sets in more languages.

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The Gates Foundation has pledged to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years to expand global access to artificial intelligence and use it to tackle social inequalities.

The intervention came amid a growing debate over the risks posed by the technology, with many of the industry’s leading figures calling for a slowdown in its development.

The foundation’s annual Goalkeepers report, released on Monday, advocated an urgent effort to ensure that A.I. “helps narrow gaps between the richest and poorest rather than widening them.”


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“The window to influence who benefits, and how soon, is short,” the report argued.

If A.I. keeps developing as it is, “the most capable tools will be built first for the people and institutions most able to pay for them,” according to the report, “not necessarily for those who could benefit most.”

Most of the data used to train the early large language models was in English, according to the report, “leaving many communities that could benefit from A.I. poorly represented in the data on which these tools were built.”

The foundation said that it would divide the new funding among external groups working on its priorities, spanning work like encouraging A.I. use among doctors, farmers and teachers, or developing data sets in more languages. Though significant, the funding is a small fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars at the disposal of commercial A.I. firms.

Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft and the chairman of the Gates Foundation, has warned that A.I. could pose a grave threat to jobs and human life. “In terms of equity, A.I. will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice,” he wrote in an essay on his personal website last month, predicting that the transition to the new A.I. era would be one of the “most turbulent times in human history.”


According to Mr. Gates, who no longer works at Microsoft, the tech industry is knowingly downplaying threats posed by A.I., because there is so much money on the line.

The Gates Foundation’s announcement came after the chief executive of Anthropic called for a global slowdown of A.I. development after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology. Top executives at other major A.I. companies, including Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI; Elon Musk, who founded SpaceXAI; and Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind agreed on the need for a slower pace.

Last month, Mr. Gates warned that A.I. would spread across the economy, possibly causing job losses across the economy and leaving little room for one industry to absorb the refugees from another. The biggest tech companies in the world, including Microsoft, are racing to help corporate customers adopt A.I., and have said it could replace many workers.

On Monday, Mr. Gates urged the governments and companies developing the technology to focus on how A.I. could help people who have most to gain from the technology, rather than the most profitable users.

“We can harness A.I. for good,” Mr. Gates wrote. “But it won’t happen by accident.”