The US Army runs out of unlimited AI tokens
Tokenmaxxing.
Image by Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
- The US Army reportedly exhausted its annual Ask Sage AI token supply by mid-June, despite promising unlimited access in May 2026.
- DEVCOM staff were told to limit usage after the Army CIO restored caps on AI tokens, Wired reported.
- Ask Sage lets government users access large AI models, including ChatGPT and Gemini, through a multimodal platform.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
The Army allegedly burned the whole year's worth of tokens just for one AI service.
The members of the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) received an email informing them that they need to limit their token use, Wired reports.
This is despite the Army Chief Information Officer’s (CIO) announcement in May 2026 that they were offering unlimited tokens to service members.
By mid-June, however, tokens were exhausted, prompting the Army CIO pool to reestablish the limits.
According to an Army employee who spoke to Wired on condition of anonymity, the entire year's worth of tokens was used only on one service, Ask Sage, a multimodal generative AI platform built for government agencies.
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The platform allows users to run various large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT and Gemini.
The Army employees were given an allotment of at least 200,000 tokens per month, Wired reports, citing internal emails, and were provided with additional tokens if they used up the initial allotment.
In addition, employees with Ask Sage accounts who weren’t active users of the platform were encouraged to use more of their allocated tokens.
The Army’s annual subscription had access to 100,000,000 tokens in order to use AskSage.
Tokens are units of data processed by LLM, and represent output in text or image form. A single token in the Ask Sage platform equates to 3.7 characters, documents viewed by Wired suggest.
The Pentagon said in June 2026 that 1.5 million personnel and employees of the Department of Defense (DoD) were using the military's enterprise AI program, GenAI.mil, up from fewer than 100,000 since the platform launched in December 2025.
Neither the DoD nor Ask Sage responded to the Wired requests for comment.
AI use in the military is a controversial issue, as critics warn that automated targeting and decision-making maximize destruction.
The US Army, however, isn’t alone in burning through tokens. Tech companies, the first to lay off employees in hopes of replacing them with AI, are now facing the reality that tokens cost more than human workers' salaries.
For some, the consequences of “tokenmaxxing” are extremely grim. An unnamed company received a $500 million bill for one month of Claude use after the management forgot to impose usage caps.