AI Agents Are Using More Tokens Than Humans

AI agents now use more tokens than humans do, and the gap is widening fast.

According to data shared by a16z, courtesy of OpenRouter, on February 6 this year, agent token usage crossed human usage for the first time. Since then, agent usage has grown 14×, while human usage has barely moved.

In the data shown, agents are now consuming close to five times as many tokens as people, on a seven-day average.

If every product decision we make around AI still assumes a person is on the other end, reading the output, checking the answer and deciding what to do next, then we’re building interfaces for the minority user.

Reference

• a16z’s post on X, based on OpenRouter data