Various actual token spend vs labor cost ROIs on 1-20 hour tasks from SemiAnalysis’ recent newsletter:
SemiAnalysis has writtenandtalked extensively about our Claude Code usage, but it is important to emphasize that agentic AI is no longer limited to just coding. Our analysts are using agents every day to convert excel models into dashboards, create charts for all our notes, build financial models and analyze company earnings, and much more. These are all tasks that either 1) we simply wouldn’t have been able to do before or 2) would’ve previously taken our junior analysts many hours, taking them away from far more value added tasks.
The table below shows a handful of real examples from our own workflows, comparing token spend against what the equivalent human labor would have cost:
Source: SemiAnalysis
Annualized token spend at SemiAnalysis is already ~30% of employee compensation and we’re consuming just under 5B tokens per month per employee (over 5x more than Meta!). This is power law distributed though, so there are team members running over 100B tokens a month. It’s obvious that this is still just the beginning, and that all white-collar enterprises will soon embrace agentic AI.
Within the past few months, the value of each token has clearly increased. We estimate that the true blended price per million tokens for running Opus 4.7 on agentic tasks at $0.99 despite the sticker price being $5/$25 per MTok. Agentic workloads have extremely high input-to-output ratios (our Claude Code usage has a ratio of about 300:1) and high cache hit rates (90%+). Because cached input tokens only cost $0.50/MTok, most of the tokens end up in the cheapest tier. We walk through the full methodology here.
When framed this way, it’s no wonder why Anthropic ARR has exploded from $9B to potentially $44B+ YTD. …
As mentioned earlier, the gap between the price of a frontier-level token vs the economic value of the work that can be produced by said token is the largest it’s ever been. Anthropic can either re-up the price of the base Opus family or introduce new products. We already saw the latter with Opus fast being priced 6x higher than regular Opus, and Mythos being announced at $25/$125 (5x regular Opus pricing). Both these SKUs are higher margin than regular Opus, yet the most AI-pilled businesses are still more than happy to pay the increased prices because the productivity gains outweigh the cost. If Anthropic let us pay $150/$750 for Mythos fast, we would.
Various actual token spend vs labor cost ROIs on 1-20 hour tasks from SemiAnalysis’ recent newsletter: