The US Army has had to reimpose limits on staff use of generative AI tools after burning through an entire year's supply of tokens in about a month, despite having announced "unlimited" access in May 2026. Members of the Army's Combat Capabilities Development Command were told by email that the CIO's token pool, offered as part of a subscription to the Ask Sage platform, was exhausted by mid-June and that usage would continue at current levels but might not be renewed after 1 October. The episode highlights the gap between the Pentagon's enthusiastic push for AI adoption and the practical costs and limits of running it at scale, particularly given uncertainty over future funding.

Ask Sage is a multimodal AI platform accredited for handling Controlled Unclassified Information, giving Army staff access to models including Google's Gemini, Meta's Llama and OpenAI's ChatGPT for tasks such as reclassifying personnel job descriptions. The Army held an annual allowance of 100 million tokens, with employees given at least 200,000 tokens a month and encouraged to use more if under-utilising their allocation; by comparison, the wider Defense Department reportedly used around 20 billion tokens a day during a 38-day military operation in Iran. The Army and Ask Sage did not respond to requests for comment, and an anonymous Army employee told WIRED they had found the tools unreliable. Similar overuse has hit other organisations, with Meta curbing its "tokenmaxx" culture and Uber reportedly exhausting a year's token budget in just four months.