OpenAI's employees are spending tokens on tokens on tokens. And yet it's someone outside the company who is spending the most.
The AI lab's employees are known for their high AI spending. Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, once spent $1.3 million worth of tokens in a month.
During a Tuesday enterprise event, CEO Sam Altman talked about the company's highest token spender.
Six and a half years ago, OpenAI's top token burner went through 100,000 a month, Altman said. That was "very likely the token leader in the world," he said.
"Today, 6.5 years later, that is about the per capita average in the world," Altman said, "and the token leader at OpenAI uses about 100 billion tokens a month."
That's not the top token spender in the world, though. Altman said that the company found someone outside the company who spent more — something he called a personal "embarrassment."
OpenAI has a culture of token spending. The company reportedly has a token leaderboard, and employees sometimes flex their high totals on X. It helps, of course, that OpenAI also sells the tokens.
In some other examples, OpenAI employees seemed to spend even more than 100 billion 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 unleashes its tokens, other companies are tightening up. Amazon shut down its token leaderboard, and Uber reportedly set token caps after its COO said that the spending was becoming harder to justify. On the panel, Altman referenced the meme: "My company spent my entire 2026 budget in Q1, can you make this more efficient?"
Altman said the company was continuing to push its models and explore other ways to deliver "more value for less spend."
He also said that the cost question came up quite suddenly. At the beginning of 2026, "the issue never came up," Altman said. "People were totally happy with the amount they were spending," he said.
Now, AI costs are "a huge issue," he said.