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Y Combinator’s Garry Tan uses AI agents so much, he spends up to $200K a year on tokens
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Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan spends $100,000 to $200,000 a year on AI tokens, he said on Walter Isaacson’s podcast The Builders, publishing Tuesday. The figure shows how aggressively some Silicon Valley leaders are adopting agentic AI. Tan uses agents for work and coding, and shared 23 Claude Code skills, gstack, on GitHub.
His agents go beyond work. Tan said his agent has read all his email, Dropbox, Apple Notes, and therapy notes going back 20 years. He called it a “Jiminy Cricket” on his shoulder that knows him and helps autonomously.
As an early OpenClaw adopter and power user, Tan said AI agents should not be treated like traditional software. He warned that excessive concern about repeatability and safety can trade away the best parts of working with an agent. Those parts, he said, can be similar to collaborating with a human.
Y Combinator also uses an agent “rebuilding the way we operate at YC,” Tan said. The internal agent, Stray Light, has a personality and a “company brain.” Tan said it holds total context on every founder backed, anyone who emailed, and all applications.
Tan believes personal AI agents will become mainstream if costs fall. “It’s too expensive right now,” he said, calling his spending “a crazy privilege that not everyone can do.” He also suggested free agents controlled by Big Tech may not be the answer.
When discussing the future, Tan pointed to concerns about Meta controlling social media algorithms. “We all wish that they didn’t at some level,” he said. He imagines a personal AI that users control and program, putting individuals rather than large companies in charge.
