OpenAI employees are known for pushing the limits of the company’s AI tools, but according to CEO Sam Altman, the biggest token spender today isn’t even an OpenAI employee.
The AI company has long had a culture of heavy internal AI usage. Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw and a former OpenAI engineer, previously revealed that he burned through roughly $1.3 million worth of AI tokens in a single month while building and testing products.
During an enterprise-focused event on Tuesday, Altman reflected on how dramatically AI usage has grown over the past several years by comparing today’s figures to OpenAI’s early days.
He explained that around six and a half years ago, the company’s largest token consumer was using approximately 100,000 tokens per month. At the time, Altman said that level of usage was “very likely” enough to make that person the biggest token user in the world.
Today, however, the scale is vastly different. OpenAI now has users consuming billions of tokens, and even its highest-spending internal users have been surpassed by people and organizations outside the company.
The comparison highlights just how rapidly AI adoption has accelerated, turning what was once world-leading usage into a relatively small amount by modern standards.