AI token prices plunge, raising doubts about the trillion-dollar compute boom
Corporate spending data show the cost of AI tokens in the U.S. has dropped about 41% since March, signaling a slowdown in demand for frontier models.
New data from the corporate-spending platform Ramp indicate that the effective price of AI tokens in the United States has slumped about 41% since its March high, falling from $1.15 to 68 cents per million tokens. The share of token consumption devoted to frontier models dropped from roughly 53% in early August to 45% by September, while the elite 1% of AI-heavy firms reduced per-employee spend by close to 10% in August.
The decline reflects both price cuts by model providers—OpenAI cut its GPT-5.6 Luna price by 80% and Anthropic announced its own reductions—and a shift by businesses toward cheaper mid-tier models such as Terra and Sonnet. Morgan Stanley flagged up to $300 billion of bond exposure for neocloud builders if token prices stay low, and Citadel Securities noted a bifurcation between high-end and everyday AI usage. OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar said the company aims to move away from token counting toward work-based billing, underscoring the changing economics of the AI market.
Why it matters
Falling AI token costs could curb revenue growth for leading AI firms and threaten financing for data-center projects built on booming demand assumptions.
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