OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talked about AI spending during an enterprise event on Tuesday. Six and a half years ago, OpenAI’s top AI token burner went through 100,000 a month, Altman said. That was “very likely the token leader in the world,” he said.
“Today, 6.5 years later, that is about the per capita average in the world,” Altman said, “and the token leader at OpenAI uses about 100 billion tokens a month.”
READ: Sam Altman says rapid growth of AI unlikely to lead to ‘jobs apocalypse’ (May 26, 2026)
Altman added that this was not the top AI spender in the world. He said that the company found someone outside the company who spent more, something he called a personal “embarrassment.”
According to a Business Insider report, OpenAI has a culture of token spending. The company reportedly has a token leaderboard, and employees sometimes post their high total counts on X. It is important to mention that OpenAI sells these tokens.
The report noted that OpenAI employees seem to spend more than 100 billion tokens a month. Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, once spent $1.3 million worth of tokens in a month. His screenshot showed 603 billion tokens spent in 30 days. The New York Times reported that one OpenAI employee spent 210 billion tokens in a week.
READ: Sam Altman says Elon Musk wanted to pass OpenAI to his children (May 13, 2026)
This comes as other companies are widely trying to curb their token spending. According to a recent Bloomberg report, Uber has instituted a new rule that places a monthly $1,500 cap per employee and per agentic coding tool, including Anthropic’s Claude Code or Cursor. An X post recently claimed that “Amazon has reportedly scrapped its internal AI leaderboard as costs soared,” adding that a senior executive told staff: “don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI.”
On the panel, Altman referenced the meme: “My company spent my entire 2026 budget in Q1, can you make this more efficient?” He added the company was continuing to push its models and explore other ways to deliver “more value for less spend.”
Altman also said that the question of cost came rather quickly, and that the issue never came up in the beginning of 2026. “People were totally happy with the amount they were spending,” he said. Now, AI costs are “a huge issue.”