Anthropic "pauses" token-based billing for its Claude Agent SDK

Anthropic has walked back a planned shift to token-based billing for its Claude Agent SDK that would have substantially increased costs for heavy users—a reversal that speaks to the ongoing difficulty of pricing agentic AI use in ways that developers and enterprises find sustainable. The episode is a small but telling window into the economic tensions around AI infrastructure: the costs of running large models at scale are real, and finding a pricing model that reflects that without triggering user exodus is an unsolved problem across the industry. It is also worth noting that this follows broader reporting on companies exhausting AI budgets faster than anticipated.