Artificial intelligence usage at a single company spiraled out of control and led to a half-billion-dollar bill, according to a recent report.

A consultant is sounding the alarm on what could become the norm for companies in the near future: paying for AI integration may not be all it is made out to be.

One token is equal to approximately four written characters in English text.

An AI consultant recently provided Axios with a stunning revelation that has sparked intrigue across the globe. According to the unnamed insider, one of the consultant’s clients spent approximately $500 million in a single month on AI usage.

These costs reportedly piled up because the company failed to put usage limits on its employees who have AI licenses for the large language model Claude.

Anthropic, Claude’s operator, has different pricing structures that go up to $25 per million tokens. This may seem low, but one token is equal to approximately four written characters in English text or “0.75 words,” Anthropic says on its website.

This of course includes punctuation marks.

Token consumption can be quite heavy when it comes to documents. For example, a PDF costs ~125,000 tokens, a large document is ~25,000 tokens, and a webpage is listed at ~2,500 tokens.

RELATED: The Trump phone is here — and so is the controversy. Is it any good?

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Images through Claude Vision are calculated using a formula based on picture size in pixels. The formula is width * height / 750.

For example, a YouTube thumbnail is 1280 × 720 pixels and would therefore cost about 1,229 tokens. While it might end up costing just under $5 to produce around 1,000 average-sized images, the high costs are believed to stem from the scale of employee usage as well as when Claude is used to code.

The unnamed company — which was described in a LinkedIn post as a U.S. corporation — reportedly gave employees unfettered access with zero spending caps or usage limits.

RELATED: Google’s AI overhaul of Search will overfish the internet to extinction

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Without any guardrails in place, a company that creates documents or webpages or even performs coding with AI could be passively spending tens of thousands of dollars.

One chief technology officer told Axios that employees had been using AI for some of the most trivial tasks, which included checking the weather. Token plans may not be as they seem and are not “all you can eat” buffets, the CTO said.

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​Return, Ai, Chatbot, Anthropic, Claude, Tech 

America is turning 250, and for the first time in years, its capital is starting to look the part.

Political insider Ken Farnaso has lived in Washington for 13 years. In that time, he never once saw a certain D.C. fountain turned on. Last week, he watched it run for the first time.

“Honestly, I don’t think many Washingtonians thought it would ever come back. … It’s more beautiful than I expected,” he wrote on X.

‘D.C. is looking beautiful. The fountains are almost all open.’

The transformation extends well beyond one fountain.

In July 2024, the phrase “HAMAS IS COMIN” was spray-painted onto the Christopher Columbus Memorial Fountain during large-scale demonstrations in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress. The perpetrator later pled guilty to misdemeanor destruction of government property.

The U.S. Department of the Interior noted on X that the Christopher Columbus Memorial Fountain “has been dry since before the first iPhone launched,” but today, that same fountain is gleaming white stone again.

The White House official account has been making the before-and-after contrast explicit, posting side-by-side images of Columbus Circle by Union Station — once graffiti-covered, pristine today — captioned simply: “Decline is a choice.“

Since January, a quiet but visible transformation has been under way in D.C.’s public spaces — dried-up fountains restored, graffiti-tagged monuments scrubbed clean, parks that had grown shabby suddenly tended again.

The scope stretches across the city: Lafayette Square, Freedom Plaza, Meridian Hill Park, and six other historic fountains that had gone dark are being brought back to life, while nine more — including the World War II Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial — are receiving mechanical upgrades.

At a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Trump touted the results. “D.C. is looking beautiful. The fountains are almost all open,” he said.

RELATED: 13 DC police officials placed on leave, pending termination amid crime stat manipulation scandal

Meridian Hill ParkBlaze News

Not everyone is cheering. Critics have zeroed in on the funding source: At least $60 million in National Park Service entrance fees — collected from visitors at parks across the country — is being channeled toward D.C. projects.

Aaron Weiss, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, called them “Trump’s vanity projects and the stuff that he can see from his golden throne off the Lincoln Bedroom,” arguing that crumbling infrastructure elsewhere in the park system should take priority.

The $60 million, however, comes not from the National Park Service’s main budget, but from a separate self-funded pool — entrance fees that, by law, the agency can redirect at its discretion to sites that don’t collect their own fees, like the National Mall.

That congressional budget, meanwhile, is hardly starved: Congress appropriated $3.27 billion for the National Park Service in fiscal year 2026 — 54% more than the Trump administration itself requested.

The Department of the Interior pushed back on the criticism directly, saying D.C. residents are “experiencing working fountains across the district for the first time in decades, all thanks to President Donald J. Trump” and that the agency has been addressing deferred maintenance “throughout the country.”

An additional $13.1 million is going toward the National Mall Reflecting Pool — a project that has drawn scrutiny of its own. Trump awarded a no-bid contract to a Virginia firm, and costs have ballooned from the original $1.8 million estimate to $13.1 million. Historic preservationists have filed suit, alleging that the blue coating being applied is “altering the historic character” of the pool without proper review.

RELATED: Trump reveals plans for ‘Independence Arch’ for 250th US anniversary — and it’s MASSIVE

Columbus CircleBlaze News

When Blaze News visited the newly restored fountains, not everyone in the crowd was a Trump supporter — but that didn’t seem to matter much. One D.C. resident said he hadn’t voted for Trump but that the restored fountains were a welcome sight regardless. “It’s the small things,” he said. “D.C. is my home, and it’s nice to have them back.”

A longtime Washingtonian nearby didn’t need much more than a look around. “I haven’t seen it like this for years,” she said. “It’s a beautiful day out.”

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​Dc, Decline, National mall, National park service, Politics 

Do you matter? Does what you do matter? Are you doing anything at all? Does your will have any impact on the world? Are you living with vitality?

Or are you just a hamster on a wheel in a little cage in the back of a middle school classroom thinking you are doing something when really you are just wasting your time here until lights out?

Because we can all do it, we forget that it’s special. It’s so ordinary, we forget it’s extraordinary.

To answer the first question: You do matter, and what you do matters. It doesn’t matter who you are; you matter, and you have an impact on the world. Maybe it’s a big one, or maybe it’s a little one. But even something as simple as saying good morning and smiling to the cashier who rings up your pack of cigarettes and full tank of gas is some kind of something or some kind of impact on someone else’s world.

Hamster wheel

But are you living with vitality? That’s not quite as simple. That bit about the hamster wasting time dinking around on the wheel — that’s certainly a depressing scene, but it’s a feeling all too common in a world in which many of our physical needs are satisfied whether we really do anything at all.

Everyone matters in our world, and everyone matters to someone. That’s a fact. But everyone doesn’t feel like they do, and many don’t feel like they are living a very vital life either. The hamster-wheel job that’s stable and hard to lose, the climate-controlled car that tells you when to slow down. An uneventful and seemingly predictable life finished off with some controlled simulated struggle at the gym three nights a week without an end, a shock, or a surprise in sight.

Some people dull the pain of the malaise with drugs, others zone out with Netflix or the internet.

Family matters

Still others seem to think that the only way to feel alive in our age is by seeking out extremes: dangerous travel, feats of endurance, and any other pursuit risking life and limb.

Fine for those who have the opportunity, I suppose. But honestly, vitality can be found much closer to home.

The real truth is that the most vital thing you can do in the year 2026 is something that just about everyone can do: raise a family.

Falling in love, getting married, having children, and raising a family is the last real, and completely real, thing on planet Earth.

It doesn’t matter if everything becomes entirely fake. It doesn’t matter if everyone has fake jobs, if no one owns anything for longer than six months, if all the food is processed, if all the appliances are designed with planned obsolescence in mind, and if AI takes care of just about all our needs. The entire world could be completely fake. But one last real thing will remain: family.

And it is the realness of the family that matters and that makes it so vital. When we raise a family, we are completely crucial. Our decisions determine real-world outcomes, both short term and long term. The family is not a theory or spreadsheet. It’s not a surrogate activity that stands in simply for the sake of simulating some kind of other struggle.

The family is real.

RELATED: Why I’m not worried about AI ‘replacing’ me

Universal Images Archive/Getty Images

Royal reproduction

A looming intuition in our postmodern, anti-vitalistic ennui is the feeling that we don’t have any control. Our health insurance policies, our jobs, the new charges that don’t make any sense on the phone bill, the screwed up politics, the fact that you can’t even talk to someone who speaks English on the phone anymore when you need something fixed, and that nothing seems to last very long either, and no one cares.

But of course, there is one domain where we are monarchs no matter how lowly our job or how faceless the large systems that govern our society may be.

The family.

A mother is a queen, and a father is a king. What Mom and Dad say goes. Mom and Dad don’t answer to anyone. They don’t need to ask permission, and they won’t be reprimanded by HR. When you are a parent, you are a monarch of a micro-kingdom. That might sound weird, but that’s the way to think about it. You dictate the religion, the calendar, the diet, the schedule, the language, the attitude, and everything about family life.

Dynasty building

It’s here, in this domain, where the most potent and impactful kind of vitalism still lives and will always live. Cultivating new life is the definition of impacting the world and the future. Yes, your kingdom might be small, but your impact is total, and it’s all yours.

Your vision is what matters. You are in control. What could possibly be more vital than conceiving children, naming them, raising them, teaching them, and then eventually sending them off to do the same things with the tools and ways they learned from you? You are creating a dynasty.

Because we can all do it, we forget that it’s special. It’s so ordinary, we forget it’s extraordinary. We might devote so much time and energy to thinking about money, influence, stability, the markets, the Middle East, geopolitics, sports, and work, but by far the most real and most vital thing you can do in 2026 is a seemingly most ordinary thing.

Raise a family.

​Men’s style, Fatherhood, Parenthood, Culture, Family, Lifestyle 

Joy Behar’s elitist meltdown on “The View” exposed exactly why disconnected celebrities fail ordinary American families. She hysterically claimed “we’re all going to die” because President Trump launched TrumpRx.gov to slash prescription drug prices.

While Behar lectures from her insulated bubble, millions of parents are choosing between groceries and lifesaving medicine for their sick children.

Reducing prescription drug prices by cutting out middlemen and forcing better pricing is not a death sentence. It is relief.

Behar warned viewers that the president uses TrumpRx to “put his name” on prescription drugs. Then, as a consequence, she declared, “we’re all going to die.”

Seriously?

Co-host Sunny Hostin piled on.

“He is not doing this out of the goodness of his heart,” Hostin told ABC’s nationwide audience. “He’s doing this to make money.”

No, President Trump does not profit from TrumpRx. The president receives no royalties, fees, or equity. TrumpRx is not a private entity. Several websites refer to it as “the government’s drug purchasing portal.” As anyone can see from the website address, trumprx.gov, it is a government operation.

TrumpRx delivers real relief through direct-to-consumer discounts, most favored nation pricing, and partnerships such as Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, which cut out middlemen and deliver major savings.

Consider children and individuals with serious medical needs.

Regeneron’s groundbreaking gene therapy, Otarmeni, treats a rare genetic form of deafness. Under the TrumpRx deal, it is available at no cost to American families, restoring a child’s hearing without bankrupting parents.

Families facing juvenile idiopathic arthritis or pediatric Crohn’s disease can access Humira through TrumpRx for about $950 per dose instead of nearly $7,000. That life-changing savings allows children to stay active and avoid debilitating pain.

Fertility drugs like Gonal-F dropped from hundreds of dollars to as little as $168 per pen, helping families begin the journey of conceiving and starting a family. Bevespi Aerosphere, an inhaler used to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, fell from $458 to $51. Airsupra, an inhaler used to treat asthma symptoms and attacks, dropped from $504 to $201. Trulicity, used to manage type 2 diabetes, fell from $987 to $389.

RELATED: ‘The View’ co-host has bizarre response to ‘lifelong progressive’ Whitney Cummings refusing to vote for pedophiles

Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg/Getty Images

For many families, those savings are immediate and concrete.

TrumpRx also lowers costs on dozens of other brand-name and generic medications for diabetes, asthma, migraines, and rare diseases that strike children and adults. Parents no longer have to skip refills because the price is impossible. Behar’s reflexive hatred of Trump blinds her to the suffering of working families crushed by prior high prices.

That is the real scandal.

The women of “The View” are not angry that medicine costs too much. They are angry that Trump found a way to cut costs and gets the credit for it. Their politics matter more than the families who benefit.

For a nurse, that is impossible to stomach. Families do not care whether a lower price arrives with Trump’s name attached to it. They care whether they can fill the prescription, pay the mortgage, and keep their child healthy.

TrumpRx is not perfect. No government program is. But reducing prescription drug prices by cutting out middlemen and forcing better pricing is not a death sentence. It is relief.

Behar and Hostin can sneer from the studio. Parents at the pharmacy counter know better.

​Asthma, Diabetes, Joy behar, Opinion & analysis, Politics, Regeneron, Sunny hostin, The view, Trumprx, Prescription drug prices, Big pharma 

Critics are raving about Steven Spielberg’s new sci-fi film “Disclosure Day,” which is set to hit theaters June 12. Some are calling it his “best film in 20 years.”

But because the film coincides with the government’s declassification of UFO-related files, conspiracy theories are buzzing.

One popular theory posits that “Disclosure Day” is being deliberately hyped to generate more viewership because the film is secretly designed to prepare the public for real alien/UFO disclosure.

While Glenn Beck acknowledges the suspicious circumstances surrounding the film — the globally famous Spielberg coming out of retirement with a movie about disclosure right when the government is talking more about UFOs — he doesn’t believe “the chief storyteller of the modern age” is secretly working with the government or aliens on a big psyop.

While governments have long worked with Hollywood storytellers, including Spielberg, to generate propaganda that shapes public opinion, he believes “Disclosure Day” is likely just Spielberg “reading the room.”

“He might have just seen, oh, everybody’s paranoid about all of this stuff,” Glenn says.

But Glenn argues that even if the theory is true and “Disclosure Day” is some kind of soft propaganda or predictive programming, that still wouldn’t be the most important thing about the film.

“Here’s something I think is more interesting and more important than Spielberg working with the Pentagon or the CIA or aliens,” he says. “I believe this movie and Steven Spielberg may actually represent the end of a human era.”

In the very near future, “you’re not going to need Steven Spielberg anymore,” Glenn says.

“As government, power centers, advertisers, anyone else that’s trying to get you to buy something, act a certain way, believe something, just come over to their side of thinking, wear the mask, don’t wear the mask … you don’t need Hollywood or a Spielberg anymore because you now have the algorithm.”

There’s only one thing that’s truly with us all the time — in our beds, cars, pockets/purses, bathrooms, desks, etc. — our cell phones.

“And your phone studies you all the time,” Glenn says.

“What makes you angry? What makes you laugh? What scares you? What keeps you watching? What kind of voice do you trust? What headlines make your pulse jump? It tracks all of it.”

When that kind of scary, detailed data is combined with artificial intelligence, the result is something truly dystopian.

Effective persuasion no longer requires a creative genius like Steven Spielberg because your data married to AI make a “far more powerful” tool.

“The old system of broadcasting one message like I’m doing right now to millions of people — this is over,” says Glenn. “The new system builds millions of custom messages for individual people.”

“That’s a gigantic shift, probably the biggest shift in culture, propaganda, in thinking.”

Glenn warns that right now we are in an age that will witness “the death of free will.”

Soon, our opinions, passions, decisions, and beliefs won’t stem from our own thinking; they’ll stem from the content the algorithm curated for us.

And this content will be wildly different for each person.

“One [person] gets stories about hidden corruption, UFO disclosures, and secret programs; the other gets stories about safety and experts and the dangers of misinformation,” Glenn illustrates. “Both people become more emotionally certain and hardened; both believe they discovered that truth on their own, but the machine has studied them and is feeding that to them like lab rats.”

Unlike “human propagandists” that have been “manipulating crowds for a very long time,” the machine “never sleeps” and can “[run] billions of tiny emotional experiments every single day.”

“Maybe this is why Spielberg’s movie is landing at exactly the right moment,” Glenn says, “because beneath all of the UFO or UAP fascination now sits the biggest question humans have ever asked. … What is real?”

To hear more of Glenn’s analysis, watch the video above.

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​The glenn beck program, Glenn beck, Disclosure, Steven spielberg