The AI industry loves token inflation. Your company shouldn’t

The AI industry has a quiet addiction problem: It is addicted to tokens. Every new generation of agentic AI seems to assume that the answer to complexity is to throw context at the model, keep longer histories, spawn calls, loop over tools, and let the token meter run wild. The rise of agentic systems, and now projects like OpenClaw, makes that temptation even stronger. Once you give models autonomy, they do not just consume tokens to answer questions. They consume them to plan, reflect, retry, summarize, call tools, inspect outputs, and keep themselves on track.