Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?
Microsoft recently announced major pricing changes for GitHub Copilot — changes that were drastic enough that a Reddit user said their company has started calling it the Tokenpocalypse. On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed what those changes might mean for the larger AI ecosystem. After all, as Anthropic and other big AI companies plan to go public, leading to awkward questions about profitability, we’re likely to see similar price increases for other AI products, and more usage restrictions as businesses try to keep costs under control.
- ▪Microsoft recently announced major pricing changes for GitHub Copilot — changes that were drastic enough that a Reddit user said their company has started calling it the Tokenpocalypse.
- ▪On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed what those changes might mean for the larger AI ecosystem.
- ▪After all, as Anthropic and other big AI companies plan to go public, leading to awkward questions about profitability, we’re likely to see similar price increases for other AI products, and more usage restrictions as businesses try to keep
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Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/07/is-this-the-dawn-of-the-tokenpocalypse/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 08 Jun 2026 07:05:36 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-08T07:41:38.326Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-08T08:21:09.450Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Microsoft recently announced major pricing changes for GitHub Copilot — changes that were drastic enough that a Reddit user said their company has started calling it the Tokenpocalypse. On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed what those changes might mean for the larger AI ecosystem. After all, as Anthropic and other big AI companies plan to go public, leading to awkward questions about profitability, we’re likely to see similar price increases for other AI products, and more usage restrictions as businesses try to keep costs under control. “Can these AI labs collapse that cost [and] progress the tech enough in a way that it eventually meets in the middle with customers’ appetite for spending?” Sean wondered.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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