Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

12 Grams of Carbon · 3 months ago · 38 ● 2 sources

An industry analyst argues that "tokenmaxxing"—companies intentionally pushing high token usage to drive AI adoption—was a temporary but deliberate strategy that has given way to a new phase where higher token spending produces better results, particularly in security research and agent-based loops. Anthropic's unreleased Mythos model received 100M-token budgets per security attempt, costing $12,500 per attempt, with models showing no signs of diminishing returns. As companies recognize that iterative agent loops now offer genuine value per token spent, a new era of token spending may emerge, particularly for open-source models that cost five times less but can be run proportionally more times to achieve similar results.