The AI Token Costs That Can Break Cybersecurity

As cybersecurity vendors race to embed AI into their platforms, they're shifting from predictable software licensing to volatile, consumption-based pricing that could catch security leaders off guard. The problem lies in how agentic AI works: unlike traditional machine learning, these autonomous systems can burn through millions of tokens in a single complex investigation, potentially costing an entire quarter's cybersecurity budget during a major incident. This shift is forcing security teams to make dangerous compromises, like throttling investigations mid-incident or disabling automated workflows to preserve monthly token credits, creating the same kind of blind spots that once plagued the SIEM industry.