Tokenmaxxing: Inside the enterprise AI budget crisis no one saw coming
For most of 2025 and into early 2026, the instruction coming down from enterprise boardrooms was simple and, in hindsight, dangerously unqualified: use AI more. Executives wanted usage charts climbing and quarterly reviews to show adoption. Some organisations went as far as gamifying it, rewarding the employees and teams who consumed the most tokens as evidence of productivity. The industry now has a name for the resulting behavior: tokenmaxxing.
The reckoning arrived faster than almost anyone predicted. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months, and has since capped spending at $1,500 per tool per engineer after internal leaderboards tied to Claude Code usage turned into an accelerant for runaway costs, according to reporting on the company’s internal governance changes. One enterprise reportedly spent $500 million in a single month on Claude after failing to set usage limits. A healthcare organisation burned through 1 trillion tokens in...
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