Artificial intelligence usage at a single company spiraled out of control and led to a half-billion-dollar bill, according to a recent report.

A consultant is sounding the alarm on what could become the norm for companies in the near future: paying for AI integration may not be all it is made out to be.

One token is equal to approximately four written characters in English text.

An AI consultant recently provided Axios with a stunning revelation that has sparked intrigue across the globe. According to the unnamed insider, one of the consultant’s clients spent approximately $500 million in a single month on AI usage.

These costs reportedly piled up because the company failed to put usage limits on its employees who have AI licenses for the large language model Claude.

Anthropic, Claude’s operator, has different pricing structures that go up to $25 per million tokens. This may seem low, but one token is equal to approximately four written characters in English text or “0.75 words,” Anthropic says on its website.

This of course includes punctuation marks.

Token consumption can be quite heavy when it comes to documents. For example, a PDF costs ~125,000 tokens, a large document is ~25,000 tokens, and a webpage is listed at ~2,500 tokens.

RELATED: The Trump phone is here — and so is the controversy. Is it any good?

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Images through Claude Vision are calculated using a formula based on picture size in pixels. The formula is width * height / 750.

For example, a YouTube thumbnail is 1280 × 720 pixels and would therefore cost about 1,229 tokens. While it might end up costing just under $5 to produce around 1,000 average-sized images, the high costs are believed to stem from the scale of employee usage as well as when Claude is used to code.

The unnamed company — which was described in a LinkedIn post as a U.S. corporation — reportedly gave employees unfettered access with zero spending caps or usage limits.

RELATED: Google’s AI overhaul of Search will overfish the internet to extinction

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Without any guardrails in place, a company that creates documents or webpages or even performs coding with AI could be passively spending tens of thousands of dollars.

One chief technology officer told Axios that employees had been using AI for some of the most trivial tasks, which included checking the weather. Token plans may not be as they seem and are not “all you can eat” buffets, the CTO said.

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​Return, Ai, Chatbot, Anthropic, Claude, Tech 

America is turning 250, and for the first time in years, its capital is starting to look the part.

Political insider Ken Farnaso has lived in Washington for 13 years. In that time, he never once saw a certain D.C. fountain turned on. Last week, he watched it run for the first time.

“Honestly, I don’t think many Washingtonians thought it would ever come back. … It’s more beautiful than I expected,” he wrote on X.

‘D.C. is looking beautiful. The fountains are almost all open.’

The transformation extends well beyond one fountain.

In July 2024, the phrase “HAMAS IS COMIN” was spray-painted onto the Christopher Columbus Memorial Fountain during large-scale demonstrations in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress. The perpetrator later pled guilty to misdemeanor destruction of government property.

The U.S. Department of the Interior noted on X that the Christopher Columbus Memorial Fountain “has been dry since before the first iPhone launched,” but today, that same fountain is gleaming white stone again.

The White House official account has been making the before-and-after contrast explicit, posting side-by-side images of Columbus Circle by Union Station — once graffiti-covered, pristine today — captioned simply: “Decline is a choice.“

Since January, a quiet but visible transformation has been under way in D.C.’s public spaces — dried-up fountains restored, graffiti-tagged monuments scrubbed clean, parks that had grown shabby suddenly tended again.

The scope stretches across the city: Lafayette Square, Freedom Plaza, Meridian Hill Park, and six other historic fountains that had gone dark are being brought back to life, while nine more — including the World War II Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial — are receiving mechanical upgrades.

At a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Trump touted the results. “D.C. is looking beautiful. The fountains are almost all open,” he said.

RELATED: 13 DC police officials placed on leave, pending termination amid crime stat manipulation scandal

Meridian Hill ParkBlaze News

Not everyone is cheering. Critics have zeroed in on the funding source: At least $60 million in National Park Service entrance fees — collected from visitors at parks across the country — is being channeled toward D.C. projects.

Aaron Weiss, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, called them “Trump’s vanity projects and the stuff that he can see from his golden throne off the Lincoln Bedroom,” arguing that crumbling infrastructure elsewhere in the park system should take priority.

The $60 million, however, comes not from the National Park Service’s main budget, but from a separate self-funded pool — entrance fees that, by law, the agency can redirect at its discretion to sites that don’t collect their own fees, like the National Mall.

That congressional budget, meanwhile, is hardly starved: Congress appropriated $3.27 billion for the National Park Service in fiscal year 2026 — 54% more than the Trump administration itself requested.

The Department of the Interior pushed back on the criticism directly, saying D.C. residents are “experiencing working fountains across the district for the first time in decades, all thanks to President Donald J. Trump” and that the agency has been addressing deferred maintenance “throughout the country.”

An additional $13.1 million is going toward the National Mall Reflecting Pool — a project that has drawn scrutiny of its own. Trump awarded a no-bid contract to a Virginia firm, and costs have ballooned from the original $1.8 million estimate to $13.1 million. Historic preservationists have filed suit, alleging that the blue coating being applied is “altering the historic character” of the pool without proper review.

RELATED: Trump reveals plans for ‘Independence Arch’ for 250th US anniversary — and it’s MASSIVE

Columbus CircleBlaze News

When Blaze News visited the newly restored fountains, not everyone in the crowd was a Trump supporter — but that didn’t seem to matter much. One D.C. resident said he hadn’t voted for Trump but that the restored fountains were a welcome sight regardless. “It’s the small things,” he said. “D.C. is my home, and it’s nice to have them back.”

A longtime Washingtonian nearby didn’t need much more than a look around. “I haven’t seen it like this for years,” she said. “It’s a beautiful day out.”

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​Dc, Decline, National mall, National park service, Politics 

Do you matter? Does what you do matter? Are you doing anything at all? Does your will have any impact on the world? Are you living with vitality?

Or are you just a hamster on a wheel in a little cage in the back of a middle school classroom thinking you are doing something when really you are just wasting your time here until lights out?

Because we can all do it, we forget that it’s special. It’s so ordinary, we forget it’s extraordinary.

To answer the first question: You do matter, and what you do matters. It doesn’t matter who you are; you matter, and you have an impact on the world. Maybe it’s a big one, or maybe it’s a little one. But even something as simple as saying good morning and smiling to the cashier who rings up your pack of cigarettes and full tank of gas is some kind of something or some kind of impact on someone else’s world.

Hamster wheel

But are you living with vitality? That’s not quite as simple. That bit about the hamster wasting time dinking around on the wheel — that’s certainly a depressing scene, but it’s a feeling all too common in a world in which many of our physical needs are satisfied whether we really do anything at all.

Everyone matters in our world, and everyone matters to someone. That’s a fact. But everyone doesn’t feel like they do, and many don’t feel like they are living a very vital life either. The hamster-wheel job that’s stable and hard to lose, the climate-controlled car that tells you when to slow down. An uneventful and seemingly predictable life finished off with some controlled simulated struggle at the gym three nights a week without an end, a shock, or a surprise in sight.

Some people dull the pain of the malaise with drugs, others zone out with Netflix or the internet.

Family matters

Still others seem to think that the only way to feel alive in our age is by seeking out extremes: dangerous travel, feats of endurance, and any other pursuit risking life and limb.

Fine for those who have the opportunity, I suppose. But honestly, vitality can be found much closer to home.

The real truth is that the most vital thing you can do in the year 2026 is something that just about everyone can do: raise a family.

Falling in love, getting married, having children, and raising a family is the last real, and completely real, thing on planet Earth.

It doesn’t matter if everything becomes entirely fake. It doesn’t matter if everyone has fake jobs, if no one owns anything for longer than six months, if all the food is processed, if all the appliances are designed with planned obsolescence in mind, and if AI takes care of just about all our needs. The entire world could be completely fake. But one last real thing will remain: family.

And it is the realness of the family that matters and that makes it so vital. When we raise a family, we are completely crucial. Our decisions determine real-world outcomes, both short term and long term. The family is not a theory or spreadsheet. It’s not a surrogate activity that stands in simply for the sake of simulating some kind of other struggle.

The family is real.

RELATED: Why I’m not worried about AI ‘replacing’ me

Universal Images Archive/Getty Images

Royal reproduction

A looming intuition in our postmodern, anti-vitalistic ennui is the feeling that we don’t have any control. Our health insurance policies, our jobs, the new charges that don’t make any sense on the phone bill, the screwed up politics, the fact that you can’t even talk to someone who speaks English on the phone anymore when you need something fixed, and that nothing seems to last very long either, and no one cares.

But of course, there is one domain where we are monarchs no matter how lowly our job or how faceless the large systems that govern our society may be.

The family.

A mother is a queen, and a father is a king. What Mom and Dad say goes. Mom and Dad don’t answer to anyone. They don’t need to ask permission, and they won’t be reprimanded by HR. When you are a parent, you are a monarch of a micro-kingdom. That might sound weird, but that’s the way to think about it. You dictate the religion, the calendar, the diet, the schedule, the language, the attitude, and everything about family life.

Dynasty building

It’s here, in this domain, where the most potent and impactful kind of vitalism still lives and will always live. Cultivating new life is the definition of impacting the world and the future. Yes, your kingdom might be small, but your impact is total, and it’s all yours.

Your vision is what matters. You are in control. What could possibly be more vital than conceiving children, naming them, raising them, teaching them, and then eventually sending them off to do the same things with the tools and ways they learned from you? You are creating a dynasty.

Because we can all do it, we forget that it’s special. It’s so ordinary, we forget it’s extraordinary. We might devote so much time and energy to thinking about money, influence, stability, the markets, the Middle East, geopolitics, sports, and work, but by far the most real and most vital thing you can do in 2026 is a seemingly most ordinary thing.

Raise a family.

​Men’s style, Fatherhood, Parenthood, Culture, Family, Lifestyle 

Joy Behar’s elitist meltdown on “The View” exposed exactly why disconnected celebrities fail ordinary American families. She hysterically claimed “we’re all going to die” because President Trump launched TrumpRx.gov to slash prescription drug prices.

While Behar lectures from her insulated bubble, millions of parents are choosing between groceries and lifesaving medicine for their sick children.

Reducing prescription drug prices by cutting out middlemen and forcing better pricing is not a death sentence. It is relief.

Behar warned viewers that the president uses TrumpRx to “put his name” on prescription drugs. Then, as a consequence, she declared, “we’re all going to die.”

Seriously?

Co-host Sunny Hostin piled on.

“He is not doing this out of the goodness of his heart,” Hostin told ABC’s nationwide audience. “He’s doing this to make money.”

No, President Trump does not profit from TrumpRx. The president receives no royalties, fees, or equity. TrumpRx is not a private entity. Several websites refer to it as “the government’s drug purchasing portal.” As anyone can see from the website address, trumprx.gov, it is a government operation.

TrumpRx delivers real relief through direct-to-consumer discounts, most favored nation pricing, and partnerships such as Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, which cut out middlemen and deliver major savings.

Consider children and individuals with serious medical needs.

Regeneron’s groundbreaking gene therapy, Otarmeni, treats a rare genetic form of deafness. Under the TrumpRx deal, it is available at no cost to American families, restoring a child’s hearing without bankrupting parents.

Families facing juvenile idiopathic arthritis or pediatric Crohn’s disease can access Humira through TrumpRx for about $950 per dose instead of nearly $7,000. That life-changing savings allows children to stay active and avoid debilitating pain.

Fertility drugs like Gonal-F dropped from hundreds of dollars to as little as $168 per pen, helping families begin the journey of conceiving and starting a family. Bevespi Aerosphere, an inhaler used to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, fell from $458 to $51. Airsupra, an inhaler used to treat asthma symptoms and attacks, dropped from $504 to $201. Trulicity, used to manage type 2 diabetes, fell from $987 to $389.

RELATED: ‘The View’ co-host has bizarre response to ‘lifelong progressive’ Whitney Cummings refusing to vote for pedophiles

Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg/Getty Images

For many families, those savings are immediate and concrete.

TrumpRx also lowers costs on dozens of other brand-name and generic medications for diabetes, asthma, migraines, and rare diseases that strike children and adults. Parents no longer have to skip refills because the price is impossible. Behar’s reflexive hatred of Trump blinds her to the suffering of working families crushed by prior high prices.

That is the real scandal.

The women of “The View” are not angry that medicine costs too much. They are angry that Trump found a way to cut costs and gets the credit for it. Their politics matter more than the families who benefit.

For a nurse, that is impossible to stomach. Families do not care whether a lower price arrives with Trump’s name attached to it. They care whether they can fill the prescription, pay the mortgage, and keep their child healthy.

TrumpRx is not perfect. No government program is. But reducing prescription drug prices by cutting out middlemen and forcing better pricing is not a death sentence. It is relief.

Behar and Hostin can sneer from the studio. Parents at the pharmacy counter know better.

​Asthma, Diabetes, Joy behar, Opinion & analysis, Politics, Regeneron, Sunny hostin, The view, Trumprx, Prescription drug prices, Big pharma 

Critics are raving about Steven Spielberg’s new sci-fi film “Disclosure Day,” which is set to hit theaters June 12. Some are calling it his “best film in 20 years.”

But because the film coincides with the government’s declassification of UFO-related files, conspiracy theories are buzzing.

One popular theory posits that “Disclosure Day” is being deliberately hyped to generate more viewership because the film is secretly designed to prepare the public for real alien/UFO disclosure.

While Glenn Beck acknowledges the suspicious circumstances surrounding the film — the globally famous Spielberg coming out of retirement with a movie about disclosure right when the government is talking more about UFOs — he doesn’t believe “the chief storyteller of the modern age” is secretly working with the government or aliens on a big psyop.

While governments have long worked with Hollywood storytellers, including Spielberg, to generate propaganda that shapes public opinion, he believes “Disclosure Day” is likely just Spielberg “reading the room.”

“He might have just seen, oh, everybody’s paranoid about all of this stuff,” Glenn says.

But Glenn argues that even if the theory is true and “Disclosure Day” is some kind of soft propaganda or predictive programming, that still wouldn’t be the most important thing about the film.

“Here’s something I think is more interesting and more important than Spielberg working with the Pentagon or the CIA or aliens,” he says. “I believe this movie and Steven Spielberg may actually represent the end of a human era.”

In the very near future, “you’re not going to need Steven Spielberg anymore,” Glenn says.

“As government, power centers, advertisers, anyone else that’s trying to get you to buy something, act a certain way, believe something, just come over to their side of thinking, wear the mask, don’t wear the mask … you don’t need Hollywood or a Spielberg anymore because you now have the algorithm.”

There’s only one thing that’s truly with us all the time — in our beds, cars, pockets/purses, bathrooms, desks, etc. — our cell phones.

“And your phone studies you all the time,” Glenn says.

“What makes you angry? What makes you laugh? What scares you? What keeps you watching? What kind of voice do you trust? What headlines make your pulse jump? It tracks all of it.”

When that kind of scary, detailed data is combined with artificial intelligence, the result is something truly dystopian.

Effective persuasion no longer requires a creative genius like Steven Spielberg because your data married to AI make a “far more powerful” tool.

“The old system of broadcasting one message like I’m doing right now to millions of people — this is over,” says Glenn. “The new system builds millions of custom messages for individual people.”

“That’s a gigantic shift, probably the biggest shift in culture, propaganda, in thinking.”

Glenn warns that right now we are in an age that will witness “the death of free will.”

Soon, our opinions, passions, decisions, and beliefs won’t stem from our own thinking; they’ll stem from the content the algorithm curated for us.

And this content will be wildly different for each person.

“One [person] gets stories about hidden corruption, UFO disclosures, and secret programs; the other gets stories about safety and experts and the dangers of misinformation,” Glenn illustrates. “Both people become more emotionally certain and hardened; both believe they discovered that truth on their own, but the machine has studied them and is feeding that to them like lab rats.”

Unlike “human propagandists” that have been “manipulating crowds for a very long time,” the machine “never sleeps” and can “[run] billions of tiny emotional experiments every single day.”

“Maybe this is why Spielberg’s movie is landing at exactly the right moment,” Glenn says, “because beneath all of the UFO or UAP fascination now sits the biggest question humans have ever asked. … What is real?”

To hear more of Glenn’s analysis, watch the video above.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​The glenn beck program, Glenn beck, Disclosure, Steven spielberg 

Microsoft’s leftist roots run deep, from its problematic co-founder Bill Gates and his “philanthropic” ventures to its partnership that gave birth to MSNBC — recently rebranded to MS NOW — which regularly spews left-wing talking points dressed up as actual facts. It even went out of its way to stuff leftist news stories into the widgets bar of every Windows computer via its MSN news aggregator, a service that prioritizes left-wing content over the right. That’s all about to change, though, as a string of complaints over Windows’ waning security and stability lead Microsoft to make its operating system a little more user-friendly, and the MSN feed is one of the first bad ideas on the chopping block.

A brief history of MSN

Microsoft launched the Microsoft Network all the way back in 1995, and the company has crammed it into the desktop operating system ever since. Debuting on Windows 95, it started as an online dial-up service meant to compete directly with the early internet juggernaut that was AOL.

One year later, Microsoft secured a lucrative joint venture with NBC News. In an effort to consolidate power across established cable TV and the new internet machine, the companies formed MSNBC. The nexus of their partnership saw that NBC News continued to provide 24-hour news coverage through conventional channels while Microsoft delivered those stories to its online users, boosting viewership ratings for both brands on the way to the top.

By 1998, Microsoft spun the MSN brand out into the news aggregation service known today as MSN.com. For maximum visibility, Microsoft set MSN as the homepage of its Internet Explorer browser, which, at the time, dominated the web with a 90% market share over second-place competitor Netscape Navigator. You can even see an early version of the original MSN.com thanks to web archives.

Microsoft ultimately walked away from MSNBC in 2012, selling its stake in the partnership to pursue its own venture. No longer in need of NBC’s reporting alone, Microsoft became an independent news distributor under MSN.com. This move would give Microsoft full control over which news outlets it chose to feature, as well as the right to hoard the spoils of its ad revenue from these stories. To make MSN virtually unavoidable, Microsoft injected its media influence into the Windows task bar in late versions of Windows 10 and all of Windows 11 under the name Microsoft Start. Now, any time you glance down at the task bar on your Windows PC, you’ll see messages from MSN that cover weather, finances, “breaking news,” and other topics, all begging for you to click and read.

Today, the MSN feed is one giant leftist propaganda billboard meant to promote any outlet that doesn’t espouse right-leaning ideas or values. What’s worse is that Microsoft can use this baked-in “feature” to serve left-wing content by default to Windows machines at workplaces, schools, and homes around the nation. Everywhere.

Screenshot by Zach Laidlaw/Windows 11

Microsoft’s mission to win back user trust

Unfortunately for Microsoft, a series of blunders have left users unhappy with the company’s portfolio of platforms and services. Here are just a few of its recent mistakes.

Windows has suffered from several critical bugs since the start of the year, all chipping away at OS security and eroding user trust.Microsoft’s aggressive push to inject its AI platform, Copilot, into every app and service has been poorly received, with users complaining about its ubiquitous integration that has only complicated usability.Xbox has suffered from major annual losses, with significant drops in hardware earnings and a small drop in software revenue.Where Windows once dominated the low-tier and mid-tier PC market, Apple’s new affordable Macbook Neo poses a significant threat to a computer segment that Microsoft historically kept mostly to itself.

In short, Microsoft is feeling the heat of competition, self-inflicted failures, and customer dissatisfaction on multiple fronts, and the only way to earn back user trust is to fix some of its more egregious mistakes. One of these is Windows’ user experience.

A new ‘Start’ for Windows

Microsoft Start is divided into two sections — the “Discover” view is powered by MSN propaganda, and the “Widgets” view shows only pertinent information without political commentary. By default, Microsoft Start opens to the Discover feed, filled with news stories designed to capture your attention. It’s clickbait. Meanwhile, the more useful Widgets are hidden behind an extra click; the default widgets include useful information, like weather, sports, finances, events near you, and a couple of other stragglers.

In an upcoming Windows update, Microsoft Start will show the Widgets view first, with the Discover feed as optional. Don’t get too excited, though. Microsoft will continue to pack left-wing stories into Microsoft Start, but on the upside, users can soon ignore it wholesale, making PCs a little less politically intrusive.

When asked about the decision, Microsoft said, “We’re working to make Widgets feel less distracting and overwhelming by making the experience quiet by default. To do this, we’re testing a new set of default settings designed to reduce unexpected alerts and visual interruptions.”

Get rid of MSN now

The refreshed Microsoft Start is currently only available in preview builds of Windows for developers. However, you don’t have to wait to banish the MSN feed from your taskbar. If you really want to kick it to the curb now, open Microsoft Start, click on the Settings gear at the bottom, uncheck the green toggle beside “Discover,” and that’s it! Microsoft Start will now default to the widgets view, which you can customize to your liking.

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Windows 11

You’re now free from leftist propaganda, at least in this section of your Windows PC.

​Tech