In the age of AI agents, it’s no longer enough to ask how much electricity a single chatbot prompt uses. Today’s AI models are even more complicated systems, often designed to complete complex tasks autonomously, and are made up not only of large language models, but a host of other tools and application layers which demand much more power than the humble standalone chatbot.
That makes calculating their total electricity usage a much bigger can of worms. Yet with virtual radio silence from the top private AI labs on internal energy use, it’s nearly impossible to say definitively what kind of impact our AI assistants are having on the electrical grid.
In a blog post flagged by Wired‘s Molly Taft, the climate scientist Zeke Hausfather took it upon himself to calculate the likely energy demand behind his typical sessions with Claude Code, an AI-coding assistant developed by Anthropic.
Measuring the number of tokens his AI assistant consumed, Hausfather estimated that his average daily use fell in the range of 1.2 to 5.9 kWh — an alarming amount for a single consumer, consuming more electricity than two refrigerators running all day long.
