The AI Token Shortage Begins [AI Monthly Recap]

Today on the AI Daily Brief, we're recapping the month of May, one of the single most consequential AI months we've had in a very, very long time. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Alright, friends. Quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, robots and pencils, ZenCoder, and OutSystems. To get an ad free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. If you wanna learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors@aidailybrief.ai. Today is the first day of June. And while I don't always use the first of the month to look back and reflect on the month that was, in this case, I think it's pretty important. We are now experiencing the second big AI transitional moment of 2026. Although you could argue that the first actually began in the end of twenty twenty five in the November and December period where Claude Code and Codex were on the rise, and we got the series of models including Opus 4.5 and GPT five two, which, of course, all came together to unleash the true agent era at the beginning of twenty twenty six. At this point, you've heard me talk ad nauseam about the fact that everyone went home for the holidays, started hacking around on clawed code or with these new models, and discovered that what you could do had changed fundamentally. That led into the OpenClaw period where all of a sudden people were getting their hands messy with harnesses in a new way and just an absolute explosion of new behavior around AI. Not only were software engineers actually using agentic coding tools in a mainstream way, not just vibe coding prototypes and things like that, but actually pushing agent created code into production. But the people who had previously just been knowledge work style vibe coders using tools like Lovable and Replit were moving to a way more advanced period, building much more extensive and complex applications in harnesses like Claude Code and Codex, or even spinning up and building entire agents and agentic systems, thanks to tools like OpenClaw and later Hermes, really signaling that the times had changed. Now one of the consequences of this shift in behavior is that the most relevant economic unit for AI companies ceased to be the seat and instead shifted to the token. And what I mean by that is that revenue for OpenAI and Anthropic was no longer constrained to what percentage of their users they could convert into paid seats either on the consumer or on the enterprise side, but instead how much API revenue they were getting through people actually using and consuming tokens. API based usage looks very, very different from an economic standpoint than seat based usage. To put just a little personal example on it, when I dropped the …