Mystery company as in a totally fabricated company?
this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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I think a lot of SaaS companies love it when people accidentally overuse their services.
> Be a corporate executive
> Tell your employees to use more AI in their worlflows
> Punish employees who don't use enough AI, while rewarding those who use it the most, irrespective of actual outcomes
> Be shocked when your company blows through an absurd amount of tokens in one month
and the RECORD profits after laying people off and says its due to AI increasing that profit, rinse repeat.
Don't know why bosses are universally this out of touch in literally every single industry
Because this system rewards incompetence as long as it comes with dark triad traits and a heaping dose of nepotism.
I'm really jealous of these types of guys' ability to lie without feeling anything. If I lied like that, I'd be embarrassed because my words sounded like bullshit. How do they do it?
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This is the yearly salary of 5,000 well paid employees…
Also the monthly Claude Teams Pro price for about 4 000 000 employees. Which I'm guessing perhaps they weren't using.
Or since this was only in a month, 60000 employees for that same month.
But imagine having a software studio with 1000 skilled developers to work on a project for 5 years. I have several good game ideas I could have created in that time frame. Some might even have made money. Likely not half a billion dollars but still….
This just screams money laundering though.
Sounds like a good way to move around money real and imagined.
But if we are to uncritically believe what the AI peddlers told us, that means this mystery company should be reaping $10 billion in additional revenue or quantifiable gains in productivity!
Claude yearns for the mines
I feel like this is fake company and they are spreading this to cook the books.
If it isn't a fake company I'd be shocked. It's not like there's a whole lot of external accountability in the entire business model.
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What's funnier is that typically the AI providers lose money on every query their customers make. So, this may have cost some company $500m to Anthropic, but it cost Anthropic a whole lot more than that.
What a brilliant business model.
They make it up in volume.
(Volume being how loudly they shout about how it's going to change the world and dupe more people into investing.)
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Anthropic is projecting a half a billion dollars profit this quarter
Suuuuure they are. No accounting gimmicks at all! Just suddenly profitable via magic right before they go public.
Couple of months ago they made claude code use up so many tokens the 20 dollar plan doesn't really cut it for many. Especially with the 5 hour limits.
Plenty of people on reddit complaining they ran out of the 5 hour limit in half an hour on the 200 a month plan.
Anthropic doesn't tell you when the busy time pricing takes place or how much more it costs AFAIK. You just suddenly use up more of your token quota than the actual tokens the LLM put out.
So either they've reduced their load by a lot, or their income by a lot.
Oh and the bonus: Claude Code now defaults to Opus, which now has 1M context. Not difficult to rack up bills if you've allowed additional usage after running into the limits.
Opus is still the best model, but Anthropic is becoming the worst company to deal with, even OpenAI seems to be better now.
Anyway, Qwen and GLM are like 5-10x cheaper than Opus or GPT, so I suspect that the Americans are now also running a profit from inference. But as they enshittify, using the Chinese LLMs is starting to be a much better deal.
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Just to make things clear: API access to most models is charged per input tokens + output tokens. It means that the longer your conversation is, the more you pay for every new answer. Single prompt with no context and 100 tokens of answer is cheap. Single prompt with 100k tokens of context and 100 tokens of answer is NOT cheap.
Extremely long conversations with most expensive top of the line models can absolutely demolish your budget.
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The more recent report says corporate AI adoption has found several issues with AI, with human workers turning to automating dreary and mundane tasks they don't like doing, rather than valuable or meaningful work.
Thank god we have consulting companies to tell us what humans like!
When you owe Claude half a million, you've got a problem.
When you owe Claude half a billion, Anthropic has a problem
It's probably Amazon. They can absolutely afford it.
In other news, company says unexpected expenses in its technology segment are driving layoffs and site closures. Company CEO said in an interview with Forbes, "There's no way we could have predicted this challenge. In service to our customers and our shareholders we're right sizing our operations and reevaluating our strategic priorities. We'll continue to focus on creating value while being a leader in our industry and accelerating AI adoption in everything we do."
Ugh that reads like it came from a random business sentence generator
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There are 12 mentions of the "report" and yet not a single link to the source of any report.
Anecdotally, my job trained every office employee on AI tools back in March, encouraging everyone to think of ways to incorporate the tools into their standard work. As of last week, they're asking us to get prior authorization to use their AI portal as a way to limit requests.
So some Fortune 500s must be feeling the squeeze on AI.
yep. everyone at mine was being praised for creating an agent that turned meetings into JSON and then the JSON into Asana tasks and the Asana tasks into a report and the report into an internal and external email and the email into a slack message and the slack messages and emails into weekly summary.
Burning thousands of credits for what could be replaced by...
listening
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Christ I am only realising now they probably see me asking copilot "why are you so shit" or "Just fuckoff, I'll do it myself". They pay for that.
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The 'report' is the first linked axios article, and the headline is just a bullet point in it
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-costs
An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees.
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I just want to know what are the best things to type into these ai chat boxes that will cost the most. If my company wants me to use this garbage then I want to make it as expensive as possible and when their liscenses need to be repurchased I want it to be as expensive as possible to continue to force this garbage on us
Edit. Hey everyone lots of great replies here, please keep the suggestions, fixes, corrections etc coming!
These high prices are not from people talking to chatbots.
They're using agentic tools where their prompt spawns a lot of bots which talk to themselves/the other bots and they keep going until someone (usually a higher quality reasoning model) decides that they've met the goals of the task that they were assigned.
So instead of 1 prompt and 1 response, you get 1 prompt and 800 responses across 5 different bots each using really large context windows.
"Continue modifying this code until all unit-tests pass"
(gives it conflicting unit tests)
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Most companies can't eat a half billion dollar loss so who ends up paying this? AI queries burn actual energy so the AI company would have to charge I would think.
Most companies can’t eat a half billion dollar loss so who ends up paying this?
Taxpaying proles will foot the bill somehow.
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