expensive Archives - HopeGirl Blog

AI is proving so expensive to use that major US companies are restricting employees’ access

Hope — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 22:59:00 +0000

Technology, banking, and entertainment companies are significantly restricting employee access to AI tools as monthly costs skyrocket into tens of millions of dollars, according to internal documents and communications obtained from multiple organisations.

The following was originally published by Breitbart under the title ‘Major Companies Throttle Employee AI Access as Costs Exceed Budgets’.

404 Media reports that companies across multiple industries are implementing strict limitations on employee use of AI tools after experiencing dramatic cost increases that have caught executives off guard. Internal communications from organisations including Atlassian, Adobe, Amazon, Citi and GitHub reveal a growing crisis as AI spending triples in some cases, forcing companies to cut access to powerful models and plead with workers to reduce consumption.

The situation stems from two converging factors: companies rapidly adopting AI without fully understanding the cost implications, and AI providers transitioning from flat-rate subscription models to usage-based billing that charges based on the number of AI tokens consumed during each interaction.

Citi has taken particularly aggressive action, completely shutting off employee access to the latest versions of Claude and ChatGPT models. According to an internal email, the bank disabled Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7, as well as GPT-5.5, on 24 June. The email explicitly states these models “consume significantly more AI Credits per interaction and have been the primary driver of elevated enterprise consumption.”

Before the shutdown, Citi sent employees warnings urging them to choose less powerful models unless absolutely necessary. The communication explained that since AI tokens are pooled across the entire organisation, employees with heavier AI-assisted workflows draw more from shared resources. The email provided specific guidance on which models to use for different tasks, recommending GPT-5.3-Codex for simple questions and code generation, while reserving higher-tier models like Claude Sonnet 4.6 for architectural reasoning.

Citi’s changes came in direct response to a shift from flat subscription pricing to usage-based billing in June. The bank is now monitoring daily usage patterns to identify excessive consumption early and has implemented budget controls. However, when contacted, Citi disputed the characterisation, stating it has not disabled models or implemented token allocation limits, despite internal documentation showing otherwise.

Atlassian has experienced particularly dramatic cost increases. The software company, which makes the popular Jira development tool, ended unlimited AI access and created an internal dashboard allowing employees to track costs. The dashboard shows spending increased from five million dollars in August 2025 to over $15 million in May 2026, putting the company on track to spend more than $120 million on AI tools for the fiscal year. When contacted, Atlassian claimed these figures don’t accurately reflect its AI usage but declined to specify which numbers were incorrect.

One Atlassian employee described widespread frustration among workers who had restructured their workflows around AI tools. “I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that they changed their workflow to maximise AI usage, and now they can run out in 2-3 days, especially when using agents or similar or using the latest Claude model,” the employee said. “Lots of angsty messages in Slack like ‘now how do I do my job’.”

Breitbart News previously reported that an unnamed company, speculated to be Amazon, accidentally spent $500 million on Anthropic’s Claude AI in a single month:

While $500 million stands out as an extraordinary sum, other recent incidents have demonstrated how quickly AI costs can spiral out of control. In April, a Google Cloud customer reportedly received an unexpected bill for $18,000 despite having allocated only $7 to their budget, the result of a security breach. Earlier in May, the creator of OpenClaw disclosed burning through $1.3 million in OpenAI API tokens during a single month of operation.

According to Axios, companies which previously embraced AI spending enthusiastically are now confronting enormous costs without necessarily seeing proportional benefits. The phenomenon has become so pronounced that it has earned its own terminology, with “tokenmaxxing” referring to the practice of maximising AI token usage, sometimes for dubious purposes.

AI is an increasingly divisive topic in the business world as it transitions from the novelty of AI to the actual business case. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller, ‘Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI’, to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.

Solar power is at least 10 times more expensive than natural gas

Hope — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 23:59:12 +0000

A peer-reviewed study published in 2022 found that wind and solar power are more expensive than coal, natural gas and nuclear power.

The study shows that even in favourable locations like Texas, solar power is 10 times and wind power 7 times more expensive than natural gas. The differential is even greater in regions of the world that do not enjoy Texas’ favourable climate.

The next time some climate activist or wind and solar shill claims wind and solar are less expensive than conventional energy sources, point them to this study and the actual truth, James Taylor writes.

Yes, Coal and Natural Gas are Much Cheaper Than Wind and Solar

By James Taylor as published by Climate Realism on 4 March 2025

Renewable power advocates often claim wind and solar are less expensive energy sources than coal, natural gas and nuclear power. Such a claim begs the question of why the heavily subsidised Ivanpah solar power facility [in California] is going out of business, following a long line of other renewable energy project bankruptcies. Also, why would most of the world continue to build coal power plants if it is more expensive than wind and solar? The answer is wind and solar are expensive, financial losers. A recent peer-reviewed analysis proves that point.

A recent study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy, reports on the “levelized full system costs” of electricity generation. The term “full system” is key. Many entities have assessed what it costs utilities to purchase or produce electricity from existing sources and deliver it to customers. These cost assessments, however, ignore the intermittency of wind and solar and how intermittency adds substantial costs to the entire electric grid. The cost assessments also fail to account for how wind and solar projects cannot be built just anywhere and often require new, long, expensive and inefficient transformation lines to deliver power from the generation locations to consumers. This also adds substantial costs to the overall electric grid.

The peer-reviewed Energy study analyses these factors and presents an apples-to-apples cost comparison of the full system cost of wind, solar, coal, natural gas and nuclear power. The verdict is devastating to wind and solar power and explains why most of the world prefers to build coal and natural gas power plants.

Geographic location is a significant factor in the cost of producing wind and solar power. For example, producing solar power in Germany, with its northern latitude and frequent cloudiness, is three times more expensive than producing solar power in the southern latitude and general sunniness of western Texas.

Indeed, Texas is about as favourable an environment as there is for wind and solar power. In western Texas, in particular, the southern latitude, predominant sunshine and persistent windiness make for extremely favourable conditions for wind and solar power.

Even in Texas, however, the Energy study shows wind and solar power are prohibitively expensive. The peer-reviewed study shows solar power produced in Texas is more than triple the cost of nuclear power, more than quadruple the cost of coal power and more than 10 times the cost of natural gas power.

By the full system numbers, solar power in Texas costs $413 per megawatt hour (“MWh”) of generation. Wind power costs $291 per MWh. Nuclear power costs $122. Coal power costs $90. Natural gas power costs merely $40. That is a huge price differential between wind and solar versus all other energy sources.

In most places, it costs even more to produce wind and solar power than in the favourable climate conditions of Texas. So, the disparity is typically greater than the numbers reported above.

Another important factor to consider is a typical proposal for a new wind or solar power project does not entail building wind and solar to fill an imminent new power need. Typically, climate activists and monopoly utilities propose shutting down a perfectly operating – and already built and paid for – coal, nuclear or natural gas power plant and replacing it with wind and solar. Building a new wind or solar power project to provide power is substantially more expensive than building a new coal, nuclear or natural gas power plant to provide power. Shutting down an already paid-for coal, nuclear or natural gas power plant to build an expensive new wind or solar project makes even less economic sense.

Utilities often support such wind and solar madness because they make a financial killing on wind and solar projects. Governments typically guarantee monopoly utilities an approximately 10% profit on their expenditures, including the cost of building new wind and solar projects. Construction for large solar projects can cost $2 billion, $3 billion or more. That means a guaranteed utility profit of $200 million or more per project. A utility pushing for more wind and solar power has nothing to do with saving consumers money and everything to do with stuffing the utility’s own pockets.

The next time some climate activist or wind and solar shill claims wind and solar are less expensive than conventional energy sources, point them to the peer-reviewed Energy study and the actual truth.

Source: https://expose-news.com/2025/03/04/solar-power-is-at-least-10-times-more-expensive/

Bitchute: https://www.bitchut,e.com/channel/YBM3rvf5ydDM/

Gab: https://gab.com/hopegirl

Telegram: https://t.me/Hopegirl587

EMF Protection Products: www.ftwproject.com

QEG Clean Energy Academy: www.cleanenergyacademy.com

Forbidden Tech Book: www.forbiddentech.website

The post Solar power is at least 10 times more expensive than natural gas appeared first on HopeGirl Blog.