The AI boom has a new complication

Data: Silicon Data, Ramp; Chart: Axios/Matt PhillipsPrices for tokens — a measure of AI usage — have tumbled in recent months.Why it matters: The price drop raises questions about the strength of an AI boom fueled by supposedly bottomless demand for computing power. The latest: There's no token price that captures all activity, but several available public indexes show similar declines.Silicon Data's LLM Token Expenditure Index — a volume-weighted benchmark of AI token prices that captures a shifting mix toward lower-priced models — has broken the buck in recent days, falling below $1 per million tokens. It's down 54% from its peak of $2.07 per million tokens in late May. The token price index produced by corporate spending management company Ramp — based on spending by actual businesses on OpenAI and Anthropic — is down 48% from its late February peak of $1.22 per million tokens. What they're saying: The collapse in token prices reflects both the impact of corporate customers switching to cheaper, open-weight models and the price cuts that OpenAI and Anthropic have made."It's also a market in which the spend is not particularly sticky," Ara Kharazian, lead economist at Ramp, tell…

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