OpenAI’s biggest – Sam Altman says OpenAI’s top token user burns through about 100 billion tokens a month, but the company found someone outside the lab who spends more—an admission that reveals how quickly AI costs have become a board-level concern.
On Tuesday, Sam Altman stepped into an enterprise event and spoke about a number that sounds like it belongs in a tech demo—until you remember it’s a cost.
OpenAI, he said, has a “token leader” inside the company who uses about 100 billion tokens a month. Six and a half years ago, OpenAI’s top token spender went through 100,000 a month, Altman said, adding that it was “very likely the token leader in the world.”
Altman’s point was blunt: “Today, 6.5 years later, that is about the per capita average in the world,” he said, while also saying that the OpenAI token leader still isn’t the global champion.
The global “embarrassment” came from outside the company. Altman said OpenAI found someone beyond its own employees who spent more tokens than that 100 billion figure. He called it a personal “embarrassment.”
The discussion landed on a theme that many executives are now trying to manage with tighter controls: OpenAI has a culture of token spending. The company reportedly has a token leaderboard, and employees sometimes flex their high totals on X. There’s also a business reason tokens get talked about internally—OpenAI sells the tokens.
Altman’s comments also sit in the shadow of even larger numbers mentioned in other examples. Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, once spent $1.3 million worth of tokens in a month. Steinberger’s 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.
While OpenAI’s internal culture appears built for competition, cost discipline elsewhere is moving in the opposite direction. Amazon shut down its token leaderboard. Uber reportedly set token caps after its COO said the spending was becoming harder to justify.
On the panel, Altman referenced a meme: “My company spent my entire 2026 budget in Q1, can you make this more efficient?” It wasn’t an offhand joke so much as a snapshot of what changed as AI consumption accelerated.
Altman said the company is continuing to push its models and explore other ways to deliver “more value for less spend.” He added that the cost question arrived suddenly: at the beginning of 2026, “the issue never came up,” he said. “People were totally happy with the amount they were spending.”
Now, he said, AI costs are “a huge issue.”
OpenAI Sam Altman tokens AI spending token leaderboard enterprise event Amazon token leaderboard Uber token caps Peter Steinberger OpenClaw AI costs