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The AI spend of your nightmares
Amazon spent some $1.8 million on a Claude project that ran for five months. A senior employee said: āItās difficult to figure out how much anything [AI-related] costsā.
We had a similar experience with R Mini Arnold, my OpenClaw agent. Its costs have run up as it has grown in complexity, and it takes time to switch it to progressively cheaper models. It becomes hard to keep track of exactly what is running efficiently and what isnāt. Nathan Warren called out an outrageous few days when the bot blew through $500 a day.
The subsequent tedious audit was worth it. Many processes were running older, higher-tier models, like Opus 4.5, which are more expensive than smaller, newer models like Sonnet 5 or a slew of open-weight models. The price war that has broken out between Anthropic and OpenAI in rā¦
