A few weeks ago I ran the numbers on the token cost panic. I took the scariest figure in legal AI, the finding that agentic workflows burn a thousand times more tokens than a chat query, and followed it all the way down to a dollar amount on a real deal. The panic did not survive the arithmetic. The piece is here if you want the full walk-through. This is not that piece. The panic has moved on since I wrote it, and the new versions are smarter than the old one. The thousand-times number has quietly retired, because a thousand times almost nothing is still almost nothing. In its place are three fresher anxieties, and they deserve a real answer. The first says the model makers have a monopoly now, the price of a token is climbing, and it will climb forever, so you had better lock in a flat r
