The way we use and pay for AI is changing

For three years, businesses have bought AI the way they buy Microsoft 365.

Flat fee, line item, sat next to the Zoom invoice and asked no difficult questions. The budget holders were happy, the IT team ticked a box - and somewhere in a product division, engineers started doing things with it that nobody in finance fully understood.

That era is over.

On 14 May, Anthropic announced it would split agentic usage out of its Claude subscription and put it behind a metered credit pool, effective 15 June. GitHub Copilot will move to token-based AI Credits on 1 June.

Legacy Anthropic enterprise seats are being retired at renewal. And a tokenizer change in Claude Opus 4.7 has already pushed some API bills up by as much as 27% - with nothing moving on the published pricing page.

The thing being counted has changed. Not the stated price per thing. That is a meaningful distinction, and most enterprise procurement teams have never had to think about it.

Most CFOs don't know any of this yet.

The receipts

The receipts, though, are starting to arrive. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget by April. Its CTO told The Information he's "back to the drawing board." KPMG's latest survey has US enterprises projecting average AI spend of $207 million over the next twelve months - nearly double a year ago.

Goldman Sachs data shows large companies already overrunning AI budgets by orders of magnitude. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has said his company's Anthropic bill will run to around $300 million this year - and that he wished there were a "smart router" that could work out which queries actually needed the most capable, most expensive models, and which could be handled by something cheaper.

Meta took down the internal tokenmaxxing leaderboard its engineers had built and even Microsoft has cancelled Claude Code access for staff in several key product divisions.

The angle most coverage has missed is that this is fundamentally a buyer-side story. What's happening at Anthropic and OpenAI is interesting. What's happening at the other end of the invoice is more interesting. What does the finance director do when the AI bill doubles mid-year with thirty days' notice and no contractual recourse?

What does the GC do when she looks at the supplier agreement and realizes it was drafted on a SaaS template that has no concept of a tokenizer, no audit rights, no price-change notice period, and no exit provision worth the paper it's printed on?

The right analogy

The right analogy here isn't software but electricity. When you buy electricity, you know the rate per unit, you can read the meter, your contract has notice periods and change-of-tariff protections, and there's a regulator with views about what suppliers can and can't do quietly.

None of that IT infrastructure exists yet for AI consumption. Businesses signed deals when usage was flat-rate and predictable. Now the meter is running, and in many cases the contract gives them no visibility over how fast, no right to challenge the reading, and no meaningful exit if the numbers stop making sense.

What "AI ownership cost" looks like in a business that has never had a FinOps function is, frankly, a mess. Usage is distributed across teams, often unsanctioned, running on departmental cards that never touch central procurement. The AI bill isn't a bill - it's fifteen bills, scattered across expense reports and shadow IT budgets, none of them talking to each other.

The first time many finance teams see the true picture is when someone pulls the data together and says the number out loud. That moment, for a lot of businesses, is coming in August.

The companies now pulling back - limiting which employees can access agentic tools, restricting use of the most advanced models, quietly cancelling licenses - aren't doing so because AI has stopped working. They're doing it because the cost model has broken the business case, and the contracts give them no leverage.

Specific things buyers should insist on

There are specific things buyers should now be insisting on. Price-change notice provisions - real ones, not buried in terms and conditions - that require meaningful advance warning before a pricing architecture changes. Tokenizer stability clauses: a commitment that the method of counting consumption won't shift materially without renegotiation.

Audit rights over consumption data. Exit and portability terms that don't require a legal battle to invoke. Whether existing contracts have any teeth when the metering changes underneath them is a live question. My suspicion is that most don't, because nobody drafting AI agreements in 2023 or 2024 anticipated that the unit of consumption would be a moving target.

Timing matters. OpenAI's two-month Codex trial and Anthropic's 50% capacity boost both expire mid-July. The window of subsidized, high-capacity usage is open right now. The bills will start arriving in August. Finance teams that haven't yet had a reckoning with their AI spend are about to have one, whether they're ready for it or not.

Reasons for spending

The businesses that come out of it ahead aren’t going to be those who spent the least but those that knew what they were spending, why, and what they got for it - and whose contracts gave them somewhere to stand when the rules changed underneath them.

That requires something most AI buyers have never had to build: a proper supplier relationship, a FinOps function, and contracts written as though they were buying a utility rather than a software subscription.

The flat-fee era is over. The question is whether the contracts, the finance functions, and the legal frameworks are ready for what replaces it. For most businesses, they are not. But the August bills will focus the mind.

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