Are AI tokens the new signing bonus or just a cost of doing business?

This week, a topic that has been boomeranging around Silicon Valley bounced into the spotlight: AI tokens as compensation. The idea is straightforward enough — rather than giving engineers only salary, equity, and bonuses, companies would also hand them a budget of AI tokens, the computational units that power tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. Spend them to run agents, automate tasks, crank through code. The pitch is that access to more compute makes engineers more productive, and that more productive engineers are worth more. It’s an investment in the person holding them, is the idea.

Jensen Huang, the leather-jacket-wearing CEO of Nvidia, seemed to capture everyone’s imagination when he floated the notion at the company’s annual GTC event earlier this week that engineers should receive roughly half their base salary again — in tokens. His top people, by his math, might burn through $250,000 a year in AI compute. He called it a recruiting tool and predicted it would become standard across Silicon Valley.

It isn’t entirely clear where the idea was first, well, ideated. Tomasz Tunguz, a renowned VC in the Bay Area who runs Theory Ventures and focuses on AI, data, and SaaS startups — and whose writing on all things data has garnered a loyal following over the years — was talking about this in mid-February, writing that tech startups were already adding inference costs as a “fourth component to engineering compensation.” Using data from the compensation tracking site Levels.fyi, he put a top-quartile software engineer salary at $375,000. Add $100,000 in tokens and you’re at $475,000 fully loaded — meaning roughly one dollar in five is now compute.

That’s no coincidence. Agentic AI has been taking off, and the release of OpenClaw in late January accelerated the conversation considerably. OpenClaw is an open-source AI assistant designed to run continuously — churning through tasks, spawning sub-agents, and working through a to-do list while its user sleeps. It’s part of a broader shift toward “agentic” AI, meaning systems that don’t just respond to prompts but take sequences of actions autonomously over time.

The practical consequence is that token consumption has exploded. Where someone writing an essay might use 10,000 tokens in an afternoon, an engineer running a swarm of agents can blow through millions in a day — automatically, in the background, without typing a word.

By this weekend, the New York Times had put together a smart look at the so-called tokenmaxxing trend, finding that engineers at companies including Meta and OpenAI are competing on internal leaderboards that track token consumption. Generous token budgets are quietly becoming a standard job perk, the paper reported, the way dental insurance or free lunch once was. One Ericsson engineer in Stockholm told the Times he probably spends more on Claude than he earns in salary, though his employer picks up the tab.

Maybe tokens really will become the fourth pillar of engineering compensation. But engineers might want to hold the line before embracing this as a straightforward win. More tokens may mean more power in the short term, but given how fast things are evolving, it doesn’t necessarily mean more job security. For one thing, a large token allotment comes with large expectations. If a company is effectively funding a second engineer’s worth of compute on your behalf, the implicit pressure is to produce at twice the rate (or more).

And there’s a muddier problem underneath that: at the point where a company’s token spend per employee approaches or exceeds that employee’s salary, the financial logic of headcount starts to look different to its finance team. If the compute is doing the work, the question of how many humans need to be coordinating it becomes harder to avoid.

Jamaal Glenn, an East Coast-based Stanford MBA and former VC turned financial services CFO, similarly points out that what may seem like a perk can be a clever way for companies to inflate the apparent value of a compensation package without increasing cash or equity — the things that actually compound for an employee over time. Your token budget doesn’t vest. It doesn’t appreciate. It doesn’t show up in your next offer negotiation the way a base salary or equity grant does. If companies successfully normalize tokens as pay, they may find it easier to keep cash comp flat while pointing to a growing compute allowance as evidence of investment in their people.

That’s a good deal for the company. Whether it’s a good deal for the engineer depends on questions most engineers don’t yet have enough information to answer.