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Token

The small piece of text, a word or part of one, that a language model reads and writes with. Limits and prices of AI services are often measured in tokens.

A token is not a word

A language model does not read words but tokens: pieces of text that can be a whole word, part of a word, a number or a punctuation mark. A short, common word is usually one token; a long or rare one is split into several.

Why tokens matter

Two practical reasons. Price: pay-as-you-go services such as APIs bill by tokens read and written, usually per million. Limits: a model's context window is measured in tokens, and beyond it the model no longer "remembers" the conversation.

Not to be confused

In English a token is roughly three quarters of a word; other languages tend to be split into more tokens. An AI token has nothing to do with crypto tokens or login tokens: it is just the name for a piece of text.

In depth: Is artificial intelligence free or paid?

All the news that mentions it

October 2026

1. Kimi K3.1 Pro, Moonshot AI rilancia sui modelli open-weight: prestazioni vicine ai migliori sistemi proprietari24 Oct 2026 · Hardware Upgrade · 1 source
2. Il prezzo dei token scende, e allora perché la bolletta dell'AI sale?23 Oct 2026 · Tom's Hardware Italia · 1 source
3. I token, il punto cieco nel budget dell’AI23 Oct 2026 · Tom's Hardware Italia · 1 source
4. Vuoi l'AI di Meta in locale? Servono almeno 20.000 euro di hardware Apple22 Oct 2026 · Tom's Hardware Italia · 1 source
5. L'IA da 35B gira su iPhone a 20,51 token al secondo: come funziona MiniCPM-V 4.722 Oct 2026 · Hardware Upgrade · 1 source
6. NVIDIA comprime una fabbrica AI in un container: pronta a produrre token in 14 giorni22 Oct 2026 · Hardware Upgrade · 1 source
7. Agenti AI, le PMI italiane crescono 10,8 volte in cinque mesi19 Oct 2026 · AI4Business · 1 source
8. La RTX 3090 non va ancora in pensione: Qwen3.8 gira a 133 token/s in chat19 Oct 2026 · Hardware Upgrade · 1 source
9. Agente di OpenAI ruba token da un wallet senza autorizzazione16 Oct 2026 · Punto Informatico · 1 source
10. Muse Spark Open: il miglior open weight americano insegue ancora i cinesi16 Oct 2026 · AI4Business · 1 source
11. PS5 diventa una potente macchina per l'IA: oltre 100 token al secondo in locale16 Oct 2026 · Tom's Hardware Italia · 1 source
12. L’API Gemini 4 Argon doublera ses tarifs le 1er décembre16 Oct 2026 · ActuIA · 1 source
13. Muse Spark Open is Meta's answer to Qwen, GLM, and Kimi in the open-weight race15 Oct 2026 · The Decoder · 1 source
14. L'AI che si autoreplica e si diffonde da sola come un worm (in laboratorio)15 Oct 2026 · Tom's Hardware Italia · 1 source
15. Agenti Ai, in Italia utenti cresciuti di 10,8 volte: il 65% dei token contro il 55% dell’Ue15 Oct 2026 · Il Sole 24 Ore Tecnologia · 1 source
16. Gli agenti sempre accesi bruciano token anche quando nessuno chiede niente14 Oct 2026 · Tom's Hardware Italia · 1 source
17. PS5 e IA generativa: Qwen 27B gira sulla GPU con PS5LM Plus14 Oct 2026 · Hardware Upgrade · 1 source
18. Anthropic says it cut Claude reasoning token theft by up to 99% in fight against industrial-scale distillation13 Oct 2026 · The Decoder · 1 source
19. Meta lancia Muse Wonder e torna a sfidare OpenAI e Anthropic sui modelli di frontiera13 Oct 2026 · DDay.it · 1 source
20. Microsoft Maia 300, il chip con più potenza e meno consumi per il cloud12 Oct 2026 · AI4Business · 1 source
21. Microsoft plans to scale its own Maia AI chips to gigawatt levels by 202712 Oct 2026 · The Decoder · 1 source
22. OpenRouter, il casello dei token AI che Stripe compra per oltre 7 miliardi12 Oct 2026 · AI4Business · 1 source
23. Microsoft porta l'inferenza IA sul proprio silicio: Maia sale alla scala dei gigawatt12 Oct 2026 · Hardware Upgrade · 1 source
24. Erano ferme in un garage umido: ora 9 GPU fanno girare un'AI12 Oct 2026 · Tom's Hardware Italia · 1 source
25. Costi AI imprevedibili: perché il modello più economico può costare di più12 Oct 2026 · AI4Business · 1 source
26. AI agent teams waste massive tokens for barely measurable quality gains, research finds11 Oct 2026 · The Decoder · 1 source
27. Cheaper AI tokens are driving more demand, and that's Jensen Huang's best-case scenario11 Oct 2026 · The Decoder · 1 source
28. The maker of non-text AI model Jev valued at $7.5B just weeks after launch9 Oct 2026 · TechCrunch AI · 1 source
29. Prezzi dei token AI in calo: le sfide per OpenAI e Anthropic9 Oct 2026 · Agenda Digitale · 1 source
30. Claude Haiku 5.5 arrives with massive price cuts proving the AI pricing arms race is far from over7 Oct 2026 · The Decoder · 1 source
31. OpenAI launches Decisions API that reduces complex evaluations to yes, no, or pick one7 Oct 2026 · The Decoder · 1 source

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