The AI Token Shortage Begins [AI Monthly Recap]

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on The AI Daily Brief, we're recapping the month of May, one of the single most consequential AI months we've had in a very, very long time. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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Today is the first day of June. And while I don't always use the first of the month to look back and reflect on the month that was, in this case, I think it's pretty important. We are now experiencing the second big AI transitional moment of 2026 Although you could argue that the first actually began in the end of 2025, in the November and December period where Claude Cote and Codex were on the rise and we got the series of models, including Opus 4.5 and GPT-5 II, which of course all came together to unleash the true agent era at the beginning of 2026
At this point, you've heard me talk ad nauseam about the fact that everyone went home for the holidays, started hacking around on Claude Cote or with these new models, and discovered that what you could do had changed fundamentally. That led into the open-claw period where all of a sudden people were getting their hands messy with harnesses in a new way, and just an absolute explosion of new behavior around AI. Not only were software engineers actually using agentic coding tools in a mainstream way, not just vibe coding prototypes and things like that, but actually pushing agent-created code into production. But the people who had previously just been knowledge work style vibe coders using tools like Lovable and Replet were moving to a way more advanced period, building much more extensive and complex applications in harnesses like Claude Cote and Codex, or even spinning up and building entire agents and agentic systems, thanks to tools like OpenClaw and later Hermes, really signaling that the times had changed.
Now, one of the consequences of this shifting behavior is that the most relevant economic unit for AI companies ceased to be the seat and instead shifted to the token. What I mean by that is that revenue for OpenAI and Anthropic was no longer constrained to what percentage of their users they could convert into paid seats either on the consumer or on the enterprise side, but instead how much API revenue they were getting through people actually using and consuming tokens. API-based usage looks very, very different from an economic standpoint than seat-based usage. To put just a little personal example on it, when I dropped the personal context portfolio builder at contextportfolio.ai, turns out a lot of you wanted to use it, so much that it racked up about a $5,000 bill over the first six weeks or so of it existing. Compare that $5,000 to the $200 a month clawed seat that I had been paying for forever. You're talking about more than two years worth of clawed max seats in spend with a single six week project.
Now this is of course where the massive explosion in revenue came from for the foundation model companies this year. OpenAI surged to $30 billion in ARR and Anthropic went even farther, even faster, getting as we recently learned all the way up to $47 billion in annualized run rate as of right now.
To go from $3 billion in revenue, which was where they were at the beginning of 2025, to 47 billion in annualized revenue a year later is just staggering. And the realization of what this meant kind of where this month started. This was perhaps best captured in an article in the Atlantic called So about that AI bubble. And while the author themselves wasn't apologizing for getting it wrong or anything like that, the article itself served as a bit of a mea culpa for the Q4 period in which the media's obsession was the idea of AI as a bubble. Now remember, in Q4 the argument had never been that AI wasn't valuable. It's that the ability for the foundation model labs, i.e. the token sellers, to realize that value, felt to many as unlikely to be able to keep up with the cost of this incredibly extensive AI infrastructure buildout in the form of all these compute deals and all the things that we heard about throughout the back half of 2025
That starts to look very different when you see the type of growth numbers and frankly, the type of pure raw revenue numbers that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic were putting up. Again, because it was not based on seats, which have a natural and imaginable cap, and was instead based on tokens, where we were seeing these numbers despite it being the very, very beginnings of us scratching the surface of how much AI we could use. A lot of people, to their credit, readjusted their priors about the possibility of an AI bubble and really calibrated up their expectations of just how big this could all get. This part of the story has never gone away, and one of the big themes throughout May was as summed up in a single headline from the New York Times, how Anthropic got so big so fast. They closed the month with a $65 million fundraising round, valuing them just under a trillion dollars. There was also a competitive dynamic to this, with the month seeing Anthropic racing out ahead of competitor OpenAI when it came to business adoption, according to statistics from RAMP. And we even got what Anthropic anticipates to be not only their first profitable quarter, but the first profitable quarter for any of the big foundation model labs.