Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan says he spends up to $200,000 a year on AI tokens

The startup accelerator chief calls his heavy Claude Code habit an investment and has open-sourced the toolkit behind it Garry Tan, the president and CEO of Y Combinator, has put a price tag on his relationship with AI agents. He estimates it at roughly the cost of a senior engineer’s salary. In a conversation with Isaacson, Tan said he spends “about maybe $100[,000]-$200,000 a year on tokens.” For most people, the monthly AI bill is a chatbot subscription. Tan is playing a different sport. What Tan is actually paying for The tokens in question are usage credits for AI models. They are the units developers are billed in when they run large language models through tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code. Put simply, every prompt, every line of generated code, and every agent task consumes tokens. Run enough agents across enough projects and the meter spins fast. Tan leans on agents for a wide range of work projects and coding tasks. He has gone further than most executives in describing what that looks like day to day. He has, by his own joking admission, suffered from “cyber psychosis.” He has also said he sometimes barely sleeps because working with his agents excites him that much. Th...