Claude Code creator Boris Cherny has a message for companies that are nervous about their AI token budgets.
“ROI is absolutely the right framing because you don’t want to just think about cost because you kind of spend something on it and you get something back,” Cherny said during a recent fireside chat at Scale AI.
Jesse Chen, Meta’s director of product management who moderated the chat, asked the Anthropic employee directly about the recent concerns raised by Uber COO Andrew Macdonald about whether the rideshare giant’s AI spending was leading to enough of a return to justify the rising cost of AI tokens.
Tokens are units of text that serve as a measurement for AI usage, such as the prompts processed by large language models, including those that power chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude or its generative AI coding tool, Claude Code.
Cherny said it’s right to be focused on ROI. It’s also important, he said, not to overdo it in response to cost concerns.
“The way to do this is give people tokens and give them safety to experiment so they feel like they can try stuff and they’re not going to get penalized for it,” he said. “Once you find these internal use cases that kind of work, then you want to control the costs and you want to do that on the backend, not on the front end.”
Otherwise, companies might miss out on the best ideas for deploying AI.
“Often, some of the most interesting ideas and the most innovative ways to improve processes and new product ideas are going to come from an accountant somewhere in the corner of the org or a marketing person that the CEO has never heard of,” Cherny said.
Cherny emphasized that Anthropic offers several ways for its enterprise customers to control costs and set budgets, including per-seat cost controls.
Others in the AI space, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, are also increasingly discussing companies’ concerns about the ROI of their AI investments.
As Cherny mentioned, AI firms like Anthropic are essentially token generators. That also means that they have an incentive to keep selling their models and generative AI tools, especially as they approach highly anticipated IPOs. The creator of Claude Code said that Anthropic is also paying attention to how its tokens are used.
“They’re not free for us because every token we use is a token we do not give to a customer, so there’s an opportunity cost,” he said. “When I think about it, it actually maybe comes back to ROI.”
Measuring that ROI is also changing, Cherny said, as the pace of AI model advancements continues to accelerate. He previously said that companies may have looked at the percentage of code written by AI. Cherny said that measurement is no longer as useful once more people let AI write 100% of their code, as he does.
“Then think about, how much is the code per engineer accelerating? And then the third thing to think about is like, what are the other bottlenecks that are getting in the way?” he said. “Because once you get it to this point where engineers are just writing a lot of code, the bottleneck is going to be like good ideas. So, how do you un-hobble that so that your company can generate ideas faster?
