The tokenmaxxing trend, i.e. the excessive use of AI tokens as proof of supposedly efficient work, actually seemed to be subsiding again. Many tech companies have now put a stop to AI waste – it’s too expensive and too unproductive.
US military uses 100 million tokens
The US military now has its own tokenmaxxing incident to deal with, Wired reports. The annual budget of 100 million tokens purchased for AI use, which was available to members of the Research and Development Command (Devcom), was used up within a month.
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A corresponding message, from which Wired quotes, states that the limits for AI use, which were only abolished in May 2026, must be reintroduced in mid-June 2026. The US Army is sticking to the use of AI at the current level. It is unclear whether the token budget will be renewed again in autumn 2026.
Multimodale KI-Plattform Ask Sage
The multimodal AI platform Ask Sage is available to members of the US military. This can access various AI models such as Alphabet Gemini, Metas Llama and OpenAIs ChatGPT. According to the US Army, Ask Sage is primarily used in the area of human resources, for example to keep army members’ tasks, experiences and backgrounds up to date.
According to Wired, army members are said to have been allocated at least 200,000 tokens each month. A single token corresponds to around 3.7 characters. The fact that employees who did not use Ask Sage often enough were encouraged to use it more by their superiors via email may have contributed significantly to the rapid token consumption.
It is not known how much the US Army paid for the 100 million token package. But it shouldn’t have been too much. Two examples show that consumption can be much higher.
Token consumption can be significantly higher
The US Department of Defense is said to have used around 20 billion tokens during the 38-day operation “Epic Fury” in Iran, as the Breaking Defense portal writes. According to a report by The Information, Meta employees used a whopping 60 billion tokens during the month of April 2026.
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At this point in time, Meta employees are said to have been in a race for the highest token consumption. The person at the top is said to have used over 280 billion tokens alone.
