Sam Altman 'accepts' clients telling him they spent entire 2026 budget in Q1

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, has admitted that businesses are increasingly concerned about the cost of using artificial intelligence (AI). The chief executive of the AI company has revealed that some customers are telling OpenAI that they have already exhausted their annual AI budgets within the first few months of the year.

Speaking at the Intelligence at Work event, Altman said concerns about AI spending have emerged rapidly among OpenAI's customers, marking a shift from earlier conversations that focused primarily on expanding usage.According to a report by Tom’s Hardware, Altman said, “People are really saying, you know, it’s kind of a meme now, but ‘My company spent my entire 2026 budget in Q1. Can you make this more efficient?’ We are continuing to push on that more with models. I think we’ll have a lot of ways we can help people get more value for less spend. But that went from, at the beginning of this year, an issue that never came up (people were totally happy with the amount they were spending) to, all of a sudden, a huge issue.”The comments come as companies across industries increase their investments in AI tools and agents to improve productivity and automate tasks. However, rising usage has also led to larger-than-expected AI bills for some organisations.

How companies are reassessing their AI spending as token usage grows

Several companies have recently highlighted the rising costs of large-scale AI deployments. Meanwhile, some businesses have encouraged employees to increase their use of AI, believing it could boost productivity and revenue. Despite concerns about costs, Altman believes AI usage will continue expanding. According to him, the company's largest customer six-and-a-half years ago used around 100,000 tokens per month.

Currently, that figure is roughly equivalent to average global per-capita token consumption, while OpenAI's highest-volume user consumes about 100 billion tokens each month, he added. Altman noted that another user consumes even more than that, though he admitted he was surprised by the scale of the usage.The trend reflects what economists describe as Jevons paradox, where lower costs and greater efficiency lead to increased consumption rather than reduced demand.

As AI models become cheaper and more capable, organisations are deploying them more widely, particularly through agent-based systems that can perform multiple tasks autonomously.However, the rapid increase in token consumption has also raised questions about whether efficiency gains can keep pace with growing demand. Some companies have found that operating advanced AI systems can, in certain cases, cost more than employing human workers for comparable tasks.

OpenAI is now focusing on improving model efficiency as customers seek ways to balance expanding AI adoption with growing operational costs, according to Altman.Earlier, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said engineers should use AI tokens worth at least half their annual salary, while OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger revealed that his team spent $1.3 million on OpenAI API tokens in a single month, consuming 603 billion tokens.At the same time, reports suggest some organisations are beginning to scrutinise those costs more closely. Amazon employees have reportedly used AI agents for low-priority tasks to improve their rankings on internal AI leaderboards, while Microsoft is said to have reduced some Claude Code licenses due to rising expenses. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has also said there is not yet a clear link between aggressive AI spending and successful product outcomes.