What Is the Impact of Claws on Token Usage?
Summary:
Each wave of AI has significantly increased token usage. Autonomous agents, or claws, could drive inference demand 1,000x beyond earlier generations because they run continuously.
Direct Answer:
Each wave of AI has significantly increased token usage. Reasoning models drove roughly a 100x increase over earlier generations, and autonomous agents, or “claws,” could drive inference demand another 1,000x because they run continuously rather than only responding to individual prompts.
This increase in token usage is tied to large productivity gains. Long-running agents can work overnight, test thousands of configurations, monitor systems continuously, and escalate only anomalies or decisions that require human judgment. Source