Y Combinator accelerator head Garry Tan described annual spending of up to 200 thousand dollars on AI agents

Garry Tan, CEO of the Y Combinator accelerator, said in an interview for Walter Isaacson's podcast The Builders that he spends roughly 100 to 200 thousand dollars a year on tokens for AI agents. He uses agents for work projects as well as programming and has publicly released his set of 23 skills for the Claude Code tool called gstack, which he uploaded to the GitHub platform in order, in his own words, to show others what agents can do.

According to Tan, his agent has access to all of his email correspondence, Dropbox, Apple Notes, and even therapy notes going back twenty years. He describes its role as a constant autonomous helper in everyday life that proposes further steps on its own. According to Tan, it's a mistake to treat AI agents like ordinary software — he says that excessive emphasis on repeatability and safety deprives users of the benefits an agent offers thanks to its similarity to a human collaborator.

According to Tan, Y Combinator has also deployed an internal agent named Stray Light, which has its own "company brain" with complete context on all founders who have ever applied for support from the accelerator, as well as everyone who has written to the accelerator.

Tan believes personal AI agents will become mainstream once the costs of running them come down — he himself acknowledges that his spending is "an enormous luxury" that not everyone can afford. At the same time, he prefers personal agents fully under the user's control over free variants from big tech companies, because he believes those would once again centralize control in a way similar to social networks.