Axios reported that one company accidentally spent half a billion dollars on tokens in a single month, after leaving Claude licences uncapped. What size of company would that take, and how much would they have to use? For an org of 10,000 engineers, that's $50k per engineer per month — but of course in every org that size there are power users and slower users. What might the distribution look like?
Floor and skew set the per-engineer shape. The total sets the headcount and the peak.
Opus 4.7 at standard API rates: $5/M input, $25/M output. On the Claude for Enterprise plan the seat fee buys access only — every token (chat, Claude Code, Cowork) bills at these rates on top, with no cap unless an admin sets one. The blended rate depends on how much of the spend reads context versus writes output.
Log-scaled bars, so the multiples matter more than the lengths. Counts aren't strictly comparable across tokenisers — Opus 4.7's differs from the one behind the training-corpus figure — so treat them as orders of magnitude. Wikipedia at ~5.2 billion words; training corpus per Llama 3.1 ~15 trillion tokens.
The kernel source runs to about 40 million lines, near 350 million tokens. Converted at the blended rate, this is what the distribution's typical and heaviest users get through each month.