Coinbase's CEO outlined 5 strategies to keep AI spend low without limiting tokens

Brian Armstrong outlined how he's planning to keep AI spending at Coinbase low. Bloomberg/Getty Images Coinbase's Brian Armstrong shared tips for keeping AI spending low while letting his engineers experiment. He said he didn't want to suppress AI usage, but rather make scaling up more sustainable. His tips: use Chinese LLMs as defaults and expect tangible results from high-spending employees. Coinbase's CEO wants his engineers to keep tokenmaxxing — while keeping AI costs down. In an X post on Friday, CEO Brian Armstrong outlined five ways in which the crypto exchange is keeping AI costs low. The first of his five strategies was selecting better default LLMs — the models most engineers use by default when submitting prompts. He said Coinbase was experimenting with Chinese LLMs as defaults, which are significantly cheaper than models from frontier American AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. "We're experimenting with defaulting to open weight models like GLM 5.2 and Kimi 2.7 through our LLM gateway, while still encouraging engineers to choose the right model for the task," Armstrong wrote. GLM 5.2 and Kimi 2.7 are models developed by the Chinese AI labs Z.ai and Moonshot AI, respectively. His second strategy, one he had spoken about earlier in June, is routing prompts to their most appropriate models based on their difficulty levels. "For instance, you may want a frontier model for planning, but not for execution where they can be overkill," he wrote. "Ultimately, humans shouldn't be choosing models - AI can automate this task." The third tip was to use better caching, a technique that reduces inference costs. The fourth was to keep context lean, meaning starting new sessions when switching between tasks. And his final strategy is to improve visibility into AI spending across the company. This means all his engineers can use as many tokens as they want, but they can see their usage. Coinbase will expect "more impact" from employees who spend more on AI. Armstrong att