Y Combinator’s Garry Tan uses AI agents so much, he spends up to $200K a year on tokens
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan revealed he spends up to $200,000 annually on AI tokens to power autonomous agents that assist with his professional and personal life. He advocates for treating AI agents as collaborative partners rather than traditional software tools.
Why it matters
Tan's extreme usage patterns offer a glimpse into the future of 'agentic' AI workflows and the potential for high-level integration of LLMs into daily decision-making.
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan has, in the past, jokingly admitted that he’s suffered from “cyber psychosis” and sometimes barely sleeps because he’s so excited to be working with his AI agents. On a new episode of Walter Isaacson’s podcast The Builders , set to publish on Tuesday, Tan put a price tag on his passion.
“I spend about maybe $100[,000]-$200,000 a year on tokens,” he told Isaacson. He uses agents for countless work projects and coding tasks and has freely shared his set of 23 Claude Code skills, called gstack , on Github — an effort to help teach others what agents can do, he said.
On the one hand, he uses his agent the way many people use AI: to help him research Isaacson’s podcast and prep for the kinds of questions he might be asked. On the other, his agent also helps him run his life.
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