Sam Altman says rising AI cost is a huge issue, but he is not sure why

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has claimed that while companies are now increasingly concerned about rising AI costs, just a few months ago, it was not really an issue. Altman's comments come at a time when companies like Uber, Amazon, and Microsoft are rethinking how employees use AI tools due to higher token usage.

In Short

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says companies suddenly worried of AI costs
• He says AI token cost was never an issue before
• Uber, Microsoft, Amazon are said to be rethinking AI use after high costs

For the past few months, companies have aggressively pushed for higher AI use among employees. But recently, something seems to have changed. Big names like Uber and Walmart have now started to cap how much AI an employee can use. And the reason behind this is cost. But according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, companies did not have any issue with this spending till just a couple of months ago.

During an enterprise event earlier this week, Sam Altman claimed that now companies were approaching him, asking to make AI token use more efficient. He said, "It's kind of a meme now, ‘My company spent my entire 2026 budget in Q1, can you make this more efficient?’"

Tokens act as a unit of measurement for AI. The more work you do with an AI tool, the more tokens you consume. While companies purchase licences for their employees to use AI tools, they usually come with a set limit. And if employees exceed the limit, then the company is charged on the basis of the extra tokens consumed.

Sam Altman claimed that such concerns never really came up even till the start of 2026. He said, “The issue never came up. People were totally happy with the amount they were spending.

Keep in mind that concerns over AI spending could become an issue for OpenAI, which is believed to be planning to go public soon. OpenAI’s rival Anthropic has already filed for an IPO reportedly at a trillion dollar valuation.

Sam Altman says AI costs suddenly a huge issue

To give you some context of how much AI bills might cost. Uber has previously stated that its entire AI budget for this year was exhausted within a few months. While a recent report claimed that one company may have paid roughly $500 million (roughly Rs 4,770 crore) on Claude AI use in a single month.

While Altman claimed that OpenAI was working to provide more value for its users, he insisted that AI costs had become an issue out of the blue. The OpenAI chief said, “All of a sudden [AI costs] are a huge issue.”

It is possible that the concerns regarding costs have increased as users have consumed more tokens. Altman revealed that six and a half years ago, OpenAI’s top token user went through 100,000 tokens a month. And now, this figure is about the “per capita average in the world.”

According to the OpenAI chief, the company’s current leader in AI use consumes about “100 billion tokens a month.” And yet, this was not the global leader. Altman insisted that there was someone outside the company that was using even more tokens every month, something he termed as a personal "embarrassment."

While OpenAI is believed to still have a leaderboard that lists all employees based on AI tokens use, other companies have reportedly backtracked on their own AI leaderboards. Meta and Amazon, two companies that were said to have similar arrangements, have shut them down following mounting costs.

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