Robert Way / Shutterstock.com An AI consultant told Axios that one of their clients "recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month" on Claude, the Anthropic AI assistant, because nobody had capped how much its employees could run on the licenses they were given. Corporate leaders "are starting to question whether soaring AI spending is delivering meaningful returns." One reason the bill got so big: agentic AI tools, the kind that run multi-step tasks on their own, "eat up 1000x more tokens than querying an LLM." Tom's Hardware notes that some of that spending goes to automating "dreary and mundane tasks they don't like doing, rather than valuable or meaningful work," with some employees "even using AI models to check the weather." X users guessed the mystery client might be Amazon, where staff were reportedly caught inflating their AI token use to hit internal targets — a practice nicknamed "tokenmaxxing." The Financial Times reported that Amazon scrapped an internal AI usage leaderboard after…