Agents · 2026-11-03

Y Combinator CEO spends up to $200K a year on AI agents

Garry Tan, head of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, says his AI agents help him with work and even private life, but they are still very expensive.

✨ How much talking to AI costs

Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, told Walter Isaacson on his podcast The Builders that he spends about $100,000 to $200,000 a year on tokens. Tokens are chunks of text that you pay AI services for. The more work the AI does, the more tokens it uses.

Tan said it is "a crazy privilege that not everyone can do." He believes costs are too high right now, and that they need to come down before personal AI assistants become mainstream.

📌 What his AI agent does

An AI agent is a program that does tasks on its own rather than only answering questions. Tan uses agents to research podcast topics, prepare for questions, and write code. He also published his set of 23 Claude Code skills, called gstack, on GitHub to show others what agents can do.

Tan says his agent has access to his email, Dropbox, and Apple Notes, including his therapy notes from the past 20 years. He describes it as a "Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder" that suggests ideas before he asks.

🔹 Y Combinator's internal agent

Y Combinator also uses its own agent, named Stray Light. It has a "personality" and a "company brain": according to Tan, it has the full context of every startup the accelerator has backed and every application it has received.

🔸 Why this matters to ordinary people

Tan believes personal AI agents will eventually become mainstream, but not free agents controlled by Big Tech. He criticizes social media companies that control their algorithms and says he would like a personal AI that you control and program yourself.

The main takeaway: AI agents can already work with personal data, but their cost is still high, and questions about who controls these assistants remain open.

Sources: 🔗 TechCrunch — AI