Claude · U.S. · Fortune Technology
This CEO was out to dinner when he caught his AI agent wasting $1,000 in tokens. He says ‘insecurity’ is a bigger problem
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Branden Jenkins was out to dinner when he pulled out his phone, glanced at his AI usage dashboard, and realized his weekend coding session had cost him $1,000, charged automatically, in $1,000 increments, to a card set on auto-renew.
Key facts
- Branden Jenkins was out to dinner when he pulled out his phone, glanced at his AI usage dashboard, and realized his weekend coding session had cost him $1,000, charged automatically, in $1,000
- Uber reportedly burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget within four months, and Amazon reportedly spent $500 million on AI in a single month after rolling out access without usage caps
- Jenkins’s $1,000 weekend is a rounding error by comparison, but the point is, that’s real money
- Jenkins is the CEO of Maxio, a private-equity-backed software company headquartered in Atlanta that’s on a path toward $100 million in annual revenue over the next couple of years
Summary
Jenkins is the CEO of Maxio, a private-equity-backed software company headquartered in Atlanta that’s on a path toward $100 million in annual revenue over the next couple of years. The episode has become something of a parable inside his company, and inside corporate America more broadly, for how quickly “agentic” AI tools can consume money without anyone noticing until the bill lands. Jenkins, a self-described technical CEO who builds his own agents and automations, said he can write code from his phone using Claude even while away from his desk, which is how he ended up debugging and iterating on a project at dinner.