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Private equity firms face rising AI costs as spending outpaces budgets
AI pricing is typically higher for generated output than for input, and many PE clients do not know how many tokens weekly usage costs them.
AI is becoming more expensive for private equity deal work, and budgeting has not kept pace with the shift from AI pilots into everyday diligence and deal-team workflows, Yahoo Finance reports.
The article says AI models are priced per token, with separate rates for what users input and what the model generates. Output pricing is typically several times higher than input pricing, and more complex, longer tasks can widen the cost gap quickly, leaving firms without a clear way to track spending.
Yahoo Finance also points to a well-known example from Uber, saying the company used up its entire 2026 AI budget in four months after rolling out Anthropic’s Claude Code to thousands of engineers. It adds that agentic coding adoption rose sharply from February to March and that most engineers were using some AI tool monthly by spring, citing Forbes.
The piece says some PE advisers expect the same steep trajectory to carry into investment work and warns that confidential IPO filings by Anthropic and OpenAI could move both companies away from subsidized pricing. It notes that some firms are adding per-user monthly budget caps and experimenting with hybrids that route routine tasks to cheaper models while reserving frontier models for higher-value work.