Agents burn 5x the tokens humans do, up 14x since February: a16z

arieljalali · x · 2026-08-23

a16z's chart of the week shows humans are now the minority user of AI — agents burn nearly 5x the tokens people do, a figure up 14x since February.

A commenter calls for an "agentic DAU/MAU" metric per unique agent: how many agents keep coming back and spending tokens versus one-off hacks and experiments, highlighting how opaque real agent retention remains.

Related event: a16z: Agents Already Burn 5x Human Token Volume(4 posts)→

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