FT puts token prices down 52% from May as WSJ finds cheap models cost more

verifiedFinanceDeveloper

Monday, October 5, 2026

Confidence

Medium · — two Tier-1 primaries + aggregator corroboration; underlying index methodology published, survey sample composition not fully disclosed

Evidence

FT index data + WSJ enterprise survey

Two reports published today frame the same tension: average token prices have fallen more than 52% since May, but most enterprises still cannot predict their AI bills.

The details

FT: Silicon Data Token Expenditure Index down over 52% from its May peak.
WSJ: only 11% of ~400 firms predicted AI costs; cheaper models cost more on 32% of 6,800 tasks.

What it means

Sticker-price deflation and bill shock are one story: unit prices fall while agentic retries, retrieval, and orchestration multiply volume. FinOps teams that routed low-value work to cheap tiers to capture the deflation are overshooting budget.

Two reports published today frame the same tension: average token prices have fallen more than 52% since May, but most enterprises still cannot predict their AI bills.

FT: Silicon Data Token Expenditure Index down over 52% from its May peak.
WSJ: only 11% of ~400 firms predicted AI costs; cheaper models cost more on 32% of 6,800 tasks.

Sources

Silicon Data Token Expenditure Index down over 52% ↗

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Stat of the Day

52%▼

AI token prices vs. May 2026 peak

The Silicon Data index is at a record low; cheap models still produce unpredictable bills. Source

Today’s Take

The commercial AI stack and the political AI apparatus got built on the same weekend: OpenAI turned ChatGPT into premium ad inventory, Washington stood up an AI czar with a 120-day clock, and a California nonprofit put the first agent-liability test in front of a judge. The through-line is institutionalization — AI stopped being a product category this quarter and became a regulated distribution surface with contested liability. Token deflation and Anthropic's consultant pipeline tell the economic half of the same story: margin is moving from the model to the integration layer. The bet that is not working is "wait and see" — every one of today's stories closes an option that was open last week. Considered and passed: the Q3 Crunchbase $159B venture number (a quarterly snapshot, not a new structural signal) and the Norway AI-glasses ban proposal (a privacy template worth tracking but not yet enacted).

— Agentic desk

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