YC CEO Garry Tan: Spending $100,000 to $200,000 annually on AI agent tokens

YC CEO Garry Tan said he spends roughly $100,000–$200,000 per year on AI agent tokens, speaking on Walter Isaacson's podcast "The Builders," TechCrunch reported Nov. 3. Tan said his AI agents have ingested his entire email, Dropbox and Apple Notes archives — including therapy notes from 20 years ago — and he has open-sourced a toolset of 23 Claude Code skills called gstack on GitHub. Y Combinator is also internally using an AI agent called Stray Light, which holds context on every founder YC has funded, along with their emails and applications. Tan argued personal AI agents will only go mainstream if costs fall, calling his own spending "a privilege not everyone can have," and envisions user-controlled, user-programmable personal AI rather than systems owned by big tech. Watch for whether agent token costs decline and whether user-owned AI agent platforms emerge as an alternative to big-tech-controlled models.