Unlimited AI tokens aren’t unlimited after all as US Army burns through supply

美国陆军 AI Token 耗尽，“无限”额度终成泡影

A little over a month after the Department of Defense (DOD) bragged that nearly half of its 3.5 million employees were using AI at work, members of the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) received an email informing them that they were burning through tokens, and needed to limit use.

在美国国防部（DOD）吹嘘其 350 万名员工中近半数已在工作中使用 AI 一个多月后，陆军作战能力发展司令部（DEVCOM）的成员收到了一封电子邮件，通知他们 AI Token（令牌）消耗过快，需要限制使用。

“Although the Army CIO announced in May 2026 that they were offering unlimited tokens, by mid-June the Army CIO pool was exhausted of tokens and had to re-establish limits,” the email reads. The email goes on to say that although the Army has chosen to renew token usage at “its current levels,” it’s unclear “if the Army CIO pool will be renewed after 1 Oct.”

邮件中写道：“尽管陆军首席信息官（CIO）在 2026 年 5 月宣布提供无限 Token，但到 6 月中旬，陆军 CIO 的 Token 池已耗尽，不得不重新设定限制。”邮件还补充说，虽然陆军已选择按“当前水平”续订 Token 使用额度，但尚不清楚“10 月 1 日之后陆军 CIO 的 Token 池是否会继续续订”。

The Army uses Ask Sage, a multimodal generative AI platform where users can run different large language models (LLMs), including Alphabet’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. “Apparently the whole Army burned through the whole year of tokens for just one service,” says an Army employee who spoke to WIRED anonymously because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

陆军使用的是 Ask Sage，这是一个多模态生成式 AI 平台，用户可以在其中运行各种大语言模型（LLM），包括 Alphabet 的 Gemini、Meta 的 Llama 和 OpenAI 的 ChatGPT。一位因未获授权接受媒体采访而匿名向《连线》（WIRED）透露消息的陆军员工表示：“显然，整个陆军仅凭一个服务就耗尽了全年的 Token 配额。”

Ask Sage is used by the Army to “power its enterprise LLM workspace” and is “accredited for Controlled Unclassified Information.” It is also used by the DOD’s Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) for acquisitions. According to the Army’s website, Ask Sage was used to complete tasks like “reclassifying personnel descriptions, which involves defining and aligning job duties, experience and backgrounds.”

Ask Sage 被陆军用于“支持其企业级 LLM 工作空间”，并已“获得受控非机密信息（CUI）使用认证”。它也被国防部首席数字与人工智能办公室（CDAO）用于采购工作。根据陆军网站的介绍，Ask Sage 被用于完成诸如“重新分类人员描述，即定义和调整工作职责、经验和背景”等任务。

The Army employee says that the Army has been pushing its workers to lean into using generative AI. Employees were given an allotment of at least 200,000 tokens per month, according to emails viewed by WIRED, and were automatically allocated more if they burned through their initial allotment. Employees who had signed up for Ask Sage but were not regularly using it would receive emails encouraging them to use more of their allocated tokens.

该陆军员工表示，陆军一直在推动员工积极使用生成式 AI。据《连线》查阅的邮件显示，员工每月至少获得 20 万个 Token 的配额，如果用完，系统会自动分配更多。对于那些注册了 Ask Sage 但不常使用的员工，还会收到鼓励他们多使用配额的邮件。

In order to use Ask Sage, the Army had access to 100,000,000 tokens as part of an annual subscription to an “enterprise pack.” Tokens represent a unit of output, either in text or image, from an LLM. For the Ask Sage tool, a single token equates to about 3.7 characters, according to documents viewed by WIRED.

为了使用 Ask Sage，陆军作为“企业包”年度订阅的一部分，获得了 1 亿个 Token 的使用权。Token 代表 LLM 输出的单位（文本或图像）。据《连线》查阅的文件显示，对于 Ask Sage 工具，一个 Token 大约相当于 3.7 个字符。

The Defense Department burned through some 20 billion tokens per day during the 38-day Operation Epic Fury in Iran, according to Breaking Defense. The Army and DOD didn’t reply to requests for comment; neither did Ask Sage. It’s unclear if the tokens used by regular DOD employees are drawn from the same pool as those who might be using AI tools on classified or secret information.

据《Breaking Defense》报道，在伊朗为期 38 天的“史诗愤怒行动”（Operation Epic Fury）中，国防部每天消耗约 200 亿个 Token。陆军、国防部以及 Ask Sage 均未回复置评请求。目前尚不清楚普通国防部员工使用的 Token 是否与那些在机密或绝密信息上使用 AI 工具的人员来自同一个资源池。

This hasn’t stopped the Defense Department’s emphasis on AI. On Monday, the Intercept reported that the Pentagon has continued to lean into AI tools, and has cut the staff at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, whose jobs entailed preventing civilian casualties in conflict zones. Instead, the DOD is developing an AI tool to speed up the assessments that the Center’s staff would normally make.

但这并没有阻止国防部对 AI 的重视。周一，《拦截》（The Intercept）报道称，五角大楼继续倾向于使用 AI 工具，并削减了“平民保护卓越中心”的人员编制，该中心的工作职责是防止冲突地区的平民伤亡。取而代之的是，国防部正在开发一种 AI 工具，以加快该中心工作人员通常进行的评估工作。

The Army is not the first eager adopter of generative AI to rethink their near unlimited use. After encouraging employees to “tokenmaxx,” Meta quietly took down its leaderboard tracking token usage and is now trying to curb use. Last week, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram at Meta, floated the idea of capping token use per engineer at the company. According to reporting from Fortune, Uber also saw its engineers burning through a year’s worth of generative AI tokens in merely four months.

陆军并不是第一个在热衷于生成式 AI 后重新考虑其“近乎无限”使用额度的机构。在鼓励员工“疯狂消耗 Token”（tokenmaxx）之后，Meta 低调撤下了追踪 Token 使用情况的排行榜，并正试图限制使用。上周，Meta 旗下 Instagram 的负责人 Adam Mosseri 提出了限制公司每位工程师 Token 使用量的想法。据《财富》杂志报道，Uber 的工程师也在短短四个月内就耗尽了全年的生成式 AI Token 配额。

The Army employee says they have not found the generative AI tools to be particularly useful for their work, and that when they have used the tools, they have found them to be unreliable. One model even asserted that it had completed a task that it hadn’t, they say. “I think there are definitely several aspects of the bureaucracy of the US federal government that these tools might be helpful with. But an unthinking application and use is not going to result in an effective, efficient, and trustworthy rollout.”

该陆军员工表示，他们并没有发现生成式 AI 工具对工作有特别大的帮助，而且在使用时发现它们并不可靠。他们提到，有一个模型甚至声称已经完成了一项实际上并未完成的任务。“我认为美国联邦政府官僚机构的某些方面确实可以从这些工具中受益。但盲目的应用和使用，并不会带来有效、高效且值得信赖的部署结果。”