Coinbase is trying to keep artificial intelligence costs under control by routing prompts to cheaper models, even as internal token usage grows at an exponential pace. Brian Armstrong said Coinbase is working to send prompts to less expensive models where appropriate, with some use cases already keeping costs roughly flat while token usage continues to rise sharply. The Coinbase CEO also expects a major split in AI workloads over the next 12 to 18 months, with 80% of workloads moving to models that are 99% cheaper, while the remaining 20% continue to use the most advanced systems for tasks where maximum reasoning matters.