This week, a topic that has boomeranged around Silicon Valley came into the spotlight: AI tokens as compensation. The idea is straightforward enough – instead of just giving engineers salary, equity and bonuses, companies would also give them a budget of AI tokens, the computational units that power tools like Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. Use them to run agents, automate tasks, rotate through code. The point is that access to more computing makes engineers more productive, and 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, at the company’s annual GTC event earlier this week, he floated the idea of engineers receiving roughly half of their base salary again — in tokens. His top people, according to his math, can burn through $250,000 a year in AI computing. He called it a recruiting tool and predicted it would become standard across Silicon Valley.
It is not entirely clear where the idea was first conceived. Tomasz Tunguz, a renowned Bay Area VC who runs Theory Ventures and focuses on AI, data and SaaS startups — and whose writing about all things data has gained a loyal following over the years — talked about this in mid-February, writing that tech startups were already adding closing costs as a “fourth compensation component.” Using data from the compensation tracking site Levels.fyi, he put a software engineer salary in the top quartile at $375,000. Add $100,000 in tokens, and you’re at $475,000 fully loaded — meaning about one dollar in five is now accounted for.
It is not accidental. Agentic AI has been gaining momentum, 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 the consumption of symbols has exploded. Where a person writing an essay might spend 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.
This weekend, the New York Times put together a smart look at the so-called tokenmaxxing trend, finding that engineers at companies including Meta and OpenAI compete on internal leaderboards that track token spending. Generous token budgets are quietly becoming a standard job perk, the paper reported, the way dental insurance or free lunch once were. An Ericsson engineer in Stockholm told the Times that he probably spends more on Claude than he earns in salary, even if his employer picks up.
Perhaps tokens will truly become the fourth pillar of engineering compensation. But engineers may want to hold the line before embracing this as an outright victory. More tokens may mean more power in the short term, but given how fast things are moving, that doesn’t necessarily mean more job security. First, a large token allocation comes with large expectations. If a company is effectively funding another engineer’s calculation on your behalf, the implicit pressure is to produce at twice the rate (or more).
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
13.-15. October 2026
And there’s a muddier issue beneath that: At the point when a company’s token consumption per employee approaches or exceeds that employee’s salary, the financial logic of headcount starts to look different to its finance team. If the computer does the work, the question of how many people need to coordinate 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 make an employee worse off over time. Your symbolic budget does not deserve. It does not appreciate. It will not appear in your next offer negotiation, as a base salary or equity grant does. If companies successfully normalize tokens as wages, they may find it easier to keep cash flat while pointing to a growing computational allowance as proof of investment in their employees.
It’s a good deal for the company. Whether it is a good deal for the engineer depends on questions that most engineers do not yet have enough information to answer.