Tokenmaxxing: Why AI consumption needs control

AI spend made headlines again recently with the Claude Fable 5 model from Anthropic.

Before security concerns led to the model being suspended, there were also cost concerns.

Anthropic says Fable costs $10 or approximately €9 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens.

This is double the price of the company’s previously most expensive model, Claude Opus 4.8.

Posts soon began to pop up on LinkedIn, showing just how quickly teams were going through their tokens and, as a result, their budget.

There are some caveats here.

Namely, that Fable 5 is an advanced model and, for most businesses , won’t need to run non-stop or be used for every task.

But therein lies a key issue: AI use is accelerating and models are evolving.

But the level of control and visibility businesses have over how much is being spent, by who and for what is lagging behind.

How AI consumption became a finance problem There is a massive shift within the UK software market toward AI and specifically Anthropic’s ecosystem.

Proprietary data from Pleo looking at the top tech merchants based on number of spending customers, shows that Anthropic (Claude) surged from 12th place in Q4 2025 to 7th in Q1 2026.

Meanwhile, the average spend per customer increased +43.0% in this time.

This rapid climb signals that Anthropic has reached enterprise maturity in the UK market with businesses moving beyond the experimentation phase.

But while this reflects growing confidence in AI adoption, it also presents some financial challenges.