← News home | Spot hall

Anthropic Token's 77% Collapse Drags Idle-Mac Inference Pay to $1.23 a Day

2026-10-31 · Source:Tom's Hardware

Anthropic Token's 77% Collapse Drags Idle-Mac Inference Pay to $1.23 a Day

Darkbloom Network's rent-your-Mac model is running into token deflation, an early datapoint on how fast inference pricing is eroding the economics of consumer-contributed compute.

Seventy-seven percent in under five months. That is how far the price of an Anthropic token has fallen — and the collapse is now showing up directly in the daily payouts of people who rent their idle Macs to AI inference buyers.

Darkbloom Network, the platform that lets Mac owners monetize spare machine capacity by hosting inference workloads, has put a hard number on the damage: contributors are now earning roughly $1.23 a day. The company is openly warning that token costs are plummeting, and that the deflation is bleeding straight into the revenues of Mac users who share their compute. For a service whose pitch rests on turning dormant Apple silicon into a paying asset, the arithmetic is becoming harder to defend. Token prices, Darkbloom notes, continue to drop.

Consider what $1.23 a day means. Simple arithmetic puts gross monthly income per machine at around $37, before electricity, hardware wear and any platform fees come off the top. At that level, the case for leaving a Mac running inference overnight is thin — and the 77% slide in Anthropic token pricing indicates conditions were materially better just a few months ago.

The episode hands the distributed-compute sector a concrete datapoint on supply-side economics. Platforms built on consumer hardware have limited insulation from falling token rates, because contributor payouts appear to track those prices directly. It took less than five months for an Anthropic token to shed more than three-quarters of its value — a pace of deflation that leaves little room for long-term commitments or guaranteed earnings in markets where individuals, not data center operators, supply the machines.

For now, Darkbloom's numbers stand as a blunt warning to anyone counting idle consumer hardware as AI infrastructure: the token business is deflating fast, and contributor paychecks are following it down.

Tags: Darkbloom Network · Anthropic · AI Inference · Token Pricing · Distributed Compute · Apple Mac


Related reading


萬安算交所 AIXX · AIXX · Verified compute exchange · Enter spot hall