Agents Just Passed Humans in Token Usage — and Burn Far More Than Anyone Budgeted, Per OpenRouter COO

SaaStr·high signal

OpenRouter COO Chris Clark, who runs the world's largest AI gateway (~70 providers), reports that agentic workloads have overtaken human chat in token consumption and dramatically exceed the budgets teams set. This is the clearest signal yet that usage-based AI economics are inverting cost models built for human-paced interaction. For builders, it means inference spend is now the dominant variable cost and per-seat pricing cannot survive agents that consume 10-100x the tokens of a human user.