An independent statistical observatory. Not affiliated with any government agency.Series AIB-1 · Revised daily at 00:00 UTC · Sources refreshed 2026-09-10
AI Burn ClockIndex of the cost of retrieval by reading in AI systems

Press

Daily releases, paste-ready, with plain text and a share image on each page. Subscribe: feed.xml.

Releases

Releases by email

The national release when its figures change, your state's release on request, and the weekly digest. One click to unsubscribe; addresses are never shared.

What the index measures. The estimated cost of AI agents finding information by reading whole files rather than retrieving the passage they need, priced from public model prices and measured ratios, with every parameter on the page. Official series from the Treasury, USAspending and the Census Bureau are reproduced for scale and are not attributed to that cost.

Why it matters. On one production codebase, an agent read 16 to 47 times less per answer when a local index answered first; on published coding tasks, 2.7 times fewer tokens end to end. Worldwide AI spending is forecast at $2.59 trillion in 2026, up 47 %. The habit scales with the spend.

Figures that may be quoted, with attribution to the AI Burn Clock and the underlying source

Since the previous release

First release of this series; the change line begins with the next one.

Story starters, one per state

Each line is a checkable sentence with its release page. Rankings and shares are recomputed daily.

  1. Virginia: $128.0M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 1 of 51, 30.0 % of the US total, $14.53 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $32.5B (Census). Release
  2. Maryland: $71.6M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 2 of 51, 16.8 % of the US total, $11.43 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $25.4B (Census). Release
  3. District of Columbia: $43.1M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 3 of 51, 10.1 % of the US total, $61.38 per resident. Release
  4. California: $33.6M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 4 of 51, 7.9 % of the US total, $0.85 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $162.0B (Census). Release
  5. Ohio: $22.1M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 5 of 51, 5.2 % of the US total, $1.86 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $31.1B (Census). Release
  6. Texas: $15.8M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 6 of 51, 3.7 % of the US total, $0.50 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $65.9B (Census). Release
  7. Alabama: $14.5M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 7 of 51, 3.4 % of the US total, $2.81 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $6.2B (Census). Release
  8. Massachusetts: $14.1M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 8 of 51, 3.3 % of the US total, $1.98 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $68.3B (Census). Release
  9. New York: $11.6M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 9 of 51, 2.7 % of the US total, $0.58 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $128.6B (Census). Release
  10. Nevada: $9.7M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 10 of 51, 2.3 % of the US total, $2.95 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $3.1B (Census). Release
  11. North Carolina: $9.0M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 11 of 51, 2.1 % of the US total, $0.81 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $12.8B (Census). Release
  12. Colorado: $7.7M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 12 of 51, 1.8 % of the US total, $1.30 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $21.8B (Census). Release
  13. Georgia: $7.1M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 13 of 51, 1.7 % of the US total, $0.64 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $14.5B (Census). Release
  14. New Jersey: $6.8M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 14 of 51, 1.6 % of the US total, $0.72 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $58.7B (Census). Release
  15. West Virginia: $5.6M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 15 of 51, 1.3 % of the US total, $3.15 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $20.2B (Census). Release
  16. Alaska: $5.3M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 16 of 51, 1.2 % of the US total, $7.15 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $5.6B (Census). Release
  17. Pennsylvania: $4.0M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 17 of 51, 0.9 % of the US total, $0.31 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $47.7B (Census). Release
  18. Michigan: $3.0M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 18 of 51, 0.7 % of the US total, $0.30 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $26.7B (Census). Release
  19. Florida: $2.8M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 19 of 51, 0.7 % of the US total, $0.12 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $21.8B (Census). Release
  20. Iowa: $2.3M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 20 of 51, 0.5 % of the US total, $0.71 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $6.6B (Census). Release
  21. Utah: $2.1M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 21 of 51, 0.5 % of the US total, $0.60 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $6.7B (Census). Release
  22. South Carolina: $2.0M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 22 of 51, 0.5 % of the US total, $0.37 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $15.0B (Census). Release
  23. New Hampshire: $1.7M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 23 of 51, 0.4 % of the US total, $1.22 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $7.5B (Census). Release
  24. New Mexico: $1.1M in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 24 of 51, 0.3 % of the US total, $0.53 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $7.0B (Census). Release
  25. Oregon: $620.2K in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 25 of 51, 0.1 % of the US total, $0.15 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $15.8B (Census). Release
  26. Oklahoma: $484.0K in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 26 of 51, 0.1 % of the US total, $0.12 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $10.3B (Census). Release
  27. Mississippi: $356.6K in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 27 of 51, 0.1 % of the US total, $0.12 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $7.5B (Census). Release
  28. Arizona: $209.4K in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 28 of 51, 0.0 % of the US total, $0.03 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $6.6B (Census). Release
  29. South Dakota: $181.8K in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 29 of 51, 0.0 % of the US total, $0.20 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $4.1B (Census). Release
  30. Vermont: $140.0K in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 30 of 51, 0.0 % of the US total, $0.22 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $2.6B (Census). Release
  31. Kentucky: $50.2K in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 31 of 51, 0.0 % of the US total, $0.01 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $10.2B (Census). Release
  32. Tennessee: $27.7K in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 32 of 51, 0.0 % of the US total, $0.00 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $8.0B (Census). Release
  33. Washington: $19.3K in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 33 of 51, 0.0 % of the US total, $0.00 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $24.5B (Census). Release
  34. North Dakota: $18.0K in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 34 of 51, 0.0 % of the US total, $0.02 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $4.2B (Census). Release
  35. Wyoming: $14.4K in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 35 of 51, 0.0 % of the US total, $0.02 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $1.3B (Census). Release
  36. Connecticut: $2.5K in federal contracts naming AI performed in the state this fiscal year, ranked 36 of 51, 0.0 % of the US total, $0.00 per resident; state debt at end of FY2023 $32.5B (Census). Release

Embed and data

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Machine-readable release: /data.json, refreshed daily at 00:00 UTC. Pipeline and templates: GitHub.

Programme: the seven-day token diet

A public challenge with a leaderboard: install the plugin, work for seven days, post the score card; the lowest read-to-used ratio is published weekly. Rules and leaderboard: aiburnclock.org/diet.

Boilerplate: About XERJ

XERJ is an open-source local search engine for AI agents: one Rust binary, Elasticsearch-compatible on port 9200, that indexes any folder so an agent retrieves the passage it needs instead of reading whole files. Apache-2.0. Source: github.com/xerj-org/xerj. Documentation: xerj.org. The AI Burn Clock is maintained by the XERJ community and names XERJ as the implementation it measured; any index that returns passages instead of files produces the same effect.

Statement

"An agent that reads a whole file to find one function is not thinking. It is paying. The index shows the bill, the sources, and the controls. Move a control and argue with a factor, not with us."

Attribution: Serhii Nikolaichuk, maintainer of the AI Burn Clock; co-author of an IETF draft on attestation results.

Contact

[email protected]. Interviews and state or agency memos on request.