New Delhi, April 28 -- A new craze has taken hold of Silicon Valley in recent months. Techies looking to prove they are among the vanguard of artificial-intelligence adoption have taken to "tokenmaxxing", competing against one another to burn through the most tokens (as the chunks of text processed by AI models are known). Between January and March, the weekly tokens processed by OpenRouter, a marketplace for accessing models, quadrupled.

As demand for AI soars, the industry behind it is struggling to keep up. In March Anthropic, an AI lab whose models are popular with businesses, began throttling access to its tools at busy times, and has since been altering its subscription plans seemingly in a bid to curb usage. In April its service h...