Artificial Intelligence Community

The era of AI companies allowing unlimited usage for a flat monthly subscription fee seems to be ending. Now heavy users can quickly rack up eye-popping bills.

One company accidentally spent $500,000 on Claude Code in a month when company officials failed to set limits for employees.

What changed: Blame the rise of agentic AI tools that can perform tasks for users. They burn through far more “compute,” or processing power, which companies typically measure in units called tokens.

It’s an issue that heavy AI users on campuses are talking about, and it’s raising questions about what an AI future will cost higher education — and how colleges will afford it.