| Key Takeaways
• The price of reaching a given level of AI performance has fallen sharply, yet enterprise spending on model APIs more than doubled in six months. • Most organizations cannot say who owns the AI bill or why it spiked. • Organizations can regain control by routing every LLM API call through a single gateway that assigns ownership, enforces budgets, and records usage by department and model. |
AI tokens have become dramatically cheaper. Epoch AI found that the price of reaching a given level of performance fell between 9 and 900 times per year, depending on the task. The price of matching GPT-4’s performance on PhD-level science questions, for instance, fell 40-fold per year.
The bill that companies pay, however, tells a very different story. Menlo Ventures estimated that enterprise spending on model APIs more than doubled in six months between 2024 and 2025. And for many organizations, that bill now arrives as a surprise. In Harness’s 2026 survey, 72 percent of engineers had experienced an unexpected AI cost spike or bill in the past year. A separate survey of 500 finance leaders, commissioned by DoiT, found that 79 percent had experienced AI cost overruns over the same period.
This raises the question: if the price of AI keeps falling, who is accountable for the bill that keeps rising?