AI Agent · Andreessen Horowitz · Tom's Hardware
AI agents apply 5x more tokens than humans as cached prompts explode, headed for 10x
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Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman wrote in an X post that “AI is currently used by AI 5x more than it is used by humans.
Key facts
- In McKinsey’s 2026 State of AI survey, 40% of respondents from large organizations reported scaling AI agents, up from 27% a year earlier
- Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman wrote in an X post that “AI is currently used by AI 5x more than it is used by humans
- That number will accelerate to 10x and then higher and higher
- Micron expects RAM and storage shortages to worsen in 2027 and 2028, with customers paying more than this year, while memory makers put HBM for AI data centers first
Summary
OpenRouter is “a leading AI model gateway and routing platform.” A chart from its head of insights, Peter Walker, lists “7-day average token usage on OpenRouter split by type.” It states that, since the February crossover point, agents are using 14x more tokens while human usage is up 2.8x. The mixed category, possibly covering behavior that is part agent and part human, grew 4.7x over the same period, according to their math. In McKinsey’s 2026 State of AI survey, 40% of respondents from large organizations reported scaling AI agents, up from 27% a year earlier. Cached tokens also account for nearly all of the relative growth in token usage, a16z wrote. The same pattern shows up in the logs of a call center consultancy that tested DeepSeek on rented Nvidia H200s.