Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)

Interesting read. I don't know if I quite buy the evidence, but it's definitely enough to warrant further investigation. It also matches up with my personal experience, which is that tools like Claude Code are burning through more and more tokens as we push them to do bigger and bigger work. But we all know the frontier model companies are burning through money in an unsustainable race to get you and your company hooked on their tools.

So: I buy that the cost of frontier performance is going up exponentially, but that doesn't mean there is a fundamental link. We also know that benchmark performance of much smaller/cheaper models has been increasing (as far as I know METR only looks at frontier models), so that makes me wonder if the exponential cost/time horizon relationship is only for the frontier models.

Related ongoing thread:

Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47807006 (309 comments)

Are any inference providers currently making profit (on inference, I know google makes money)?