AI agents use 5x more tokens than humans as cached prompts explode, headed for 10x

Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman wrote in an X post that “AI is currently used by AI 5x more than it is used by humans. That number will accelerate to 10x and then higher and higher.” His data, an Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) chart of OpenRouter figures, shows agents at 7.3 trillion tokens versus humans’ 1.4 trillion as of August, six months after agent usage first surpassed humans. But the agents are mostly rereading what they’ve already seen: more than 85% of agent tokens come from cached prompts, a16z wrote, citing OpenRouter.

OpenRouter is “a leading AI model gateway and routing platform.” A chart from its head of insights, Peter Walker, lists “7-day average token usage on OpenRouter split by type.” It states that, since the February crossover point, agents are using 14x more tokens while human usage is up 2.8x. The a16z chart in Newman’s post shows the same data. …