A startup CEO says its six-figure bill for a single month of AI is a milestone, not a warning sign.
In a Saturday LinkedIn post, Swan AI CEO Amos Bar-Joseph shared a screenshot of what he said was an Anthropic receipt totaling $113,421.87, writing he had “never been more proud of an invoice.”
That approach reflects a broader shift among tech executives, where some bosses argue that AI spending could replace traditional hiring.
Swan AI, which builds AI agents for sales and marketing teams, is one such company. It compares spending on “tokens” — units of data processed by AI models — with other standard business metrics, like sales pipelines, closed deals, and customer support output.
Bar-Joseph told Business Insider that his four-person company is already in the “seven-figure” annual recurring revenue range. He also said the firm added roughly $200,000 in ARR in the past week alone.
“The number we actually optimize around is $10 million of ARR per employee,” he said in an email. “That’s the real north star for us.”
He said he’s leaning into higher AI spending as a way to reach that goal without hiring more employees.
“The question we’re always asking is: is this spend enabling us to scale without adding head count? If yes, it’s working,” he added.
Other Silicon Valley executives are making a similar argument, with some asking their employees to spend more.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said he expects $500,000 employees to spend at least $250,000 in AI tokens, while Box CEO Aaron Levie has said compute budgets will continue to rise for firms across all sectors.
Other firms — like Chamath Palihapitiya’s 8090 startup incubator — are starting to caution about the AI spending.
“The problem is that my costs are going up 3X every three months,” he said during an episode of the “All-In Podcast” in March. “My revenues are not.”
Swan AI declined to provide exact revenue figures, making it unclear how its AI spending compares to its overall margins. The company’s latest Anthropic invoice, which shows a April 15 due date, is more than double its previous month’s bill, according to Bar-Joseph’s LinkedIn posts. He previously showed a $51,217.56 invoice due in February and a $27,690.69 invoice due in March. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bar-Joseph said his company has always spent more on AI than on its four employees.
He also said that if his company scales, it could create more jobs for human workers.
“I want to be clear about what that actually means — it’s not an anti-human play. It’s the opposite,” he told Business Insider. “We’ll hire when we hit the ceiling of what intelligence can do for us. We’re not at that ceiling yet — not even close.”
