Token economics–driven architecture: hybrid models, AI Runway, AKS Kata MicroVM, MCP (opens in new tab)

1. The moment the bill arrived For most of 2024 and 2025, "Agents" were a demo word. In 2026 they are a line item on the cloud invoice. Every major model provider — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, DeepSeek, and even the in-cluster open-weights serving stacks — now bills by the token. Input tokens, output tokens, cached tokens, reasoning tokens, tool-call tokens. The unit price has come down. The number of tokens an autonomous agent burns through has gone up by an order of magnitude. The s...