TokenMaxxing: How to Get the Most Out of Your AI Models

By Jose Antonio Lanz Edited by Guillermo Jimenez Oct 17, 2026Oct 17, 2026 Meta employees burned through 60 trillion AI tokens in 30 days earlier this year, chasing spots on an internal leaderboard nicknamed "Claudeonomics." Tech columnist Gergely Orosz >estimated the tab at roughly $900 million at Anthropic's list prices, though Meta likely pays far less. Bain & Company consultant Jue Wang sees a quieter version of that waste everywhere: "So many companies, so many users, default to using Opus for everything, including generating emails," she >told the Associated Press this summer, referring to Anthropic's high-end models. If you do the same thing, you're hiring Albert Einstein to calculate your change at a MacDonald’s. Every word you type into ChatGPT or Claude, and every word it writes back, is metered in >tokens, chunks of text that average about three-quarters of a word. On a $20 subscription that meter decides how fast you hit your usage limit. On the API, the pay-per-token access developers use to plug models into their own apps, it decides the bill. Here's Anthropic's current >price list, per million tokens: Haiku's rate applies to prompts under 100,000 tokens; longer prompts cost five times as much. The top model costs 100 times more than the smallest, and OpenAI's >own lineup runs the same spread, from $10 to $0.10 per million input tokens. Those per-token prices add up fast for the labs—and you: Anthropic's revenue run rate went from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 to more than >$47 billion by May, while OpenAI is fighting a

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