AI companies are tightening token limits. The last one to blink may win
- Apr 13
- 1 min read
FAST COMPANY — For years, AI companies gave users unfettered access to the candy store, encouraging them to think of tokens, the chunks of text AI reads and writes, as effectively infinite.
Tokens were bundled into subscriptions, hidden behind generous caps, or priced low enough that people stopped counting them. But as the cost of serving models eats into revenue, and as chip shortages, helium disruption, and data center bottlenecks constrain how much compute can come online, the big model makers are starting to ration access more aggressively. All-you-can-eat AI is disappearing.
Now companies are in a contest to see who can keep subsidising demand the longest, and whether the last to blink gets to dominate the market.
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