There is a growing chorus of voices in legal AI telling you to be very, very worried about the cost of tokens. Stanford says agentic AI uses 1,000 times more tokens than a chat query. Bloomberg Law says the subsidies are ending and the meter is about to start. A company called Portal26 just launched an entire product category — “ Agentic Token Controls ” — to cap your runaway AI spend before it eats your budget alive. The message is clear: usage-based AI pricing is a ticking time bomb, and you had better lock in a flat rate while you still can. I have spent the last few days stewing over an economic model of legal AI costs, and I think this narrative is almost entirely wrong. Not wrong about the facts — the Stanford data is real, the token multipliers are real
