Y Combinator chief Garry Tan spends up to $200,000 a year on AI agent usage

Garry Tan, CEO of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, has revealed how much he spends on artificial intelligence (AI) agents. In a new episode of Walter Isaacson's podcast The Builders, due out Tuesday, Tan said he pays roughly $100,000–$200,000 a year on tokens, the units used to bill AI services. He has previously joked that he suffers from "cyber psychosis" and sometimes barely sleeps because he is so excited about working with agents.

Agents at work and in daily life

Tan uses agents across many work projects and coding tasks. He has shared a set of 23 Claude Code skills, called gstack, freely on GitHub, hoping to show others what agents can do. An agent also helped him research Isaacson's podcast and prepare for likely questions.

The agent also helps him run his life. Tan says it has read all of his email, his Dropbox and his Apple Notes, including therapy notes going back 20 years. He compares it to a Jiminy Cricket on the shoulder that knows the user, offers suggestions and helps anticipate problems.

Agents inside Y Combinator

An early adopter of OpenClaw, Tan says agents should not be treated like traditional software. In his view, some people worry so much about repeatability and safety that they give up the strengths of working with an agent. Y Combinator runs an internal agent called Stray Light, which has a personality and a "company brain": context on every founder the accelerator has backed, everyone who has emailed it and all applications.

Costs and the future

Tan believes personal AI agents may eventually become mainstream, but only if costs fall; right now, he says, it is too expensive. He calls his own spending a privilege not everyone has. He also says free agents controlled by big tech companies may not be the answer, and suggests a personal AI that users control and program themselves.