WORLDTECHDarkbloom warns Mac rental earnings will fall as AI token prices drop 77%
Darkbloom, a network that lets owners rent out spare Mac compute for AI inference, has told its members to expect lower revenues as token prices keep falling. The warning, reported by Tom's Hardware, follows a 77% drop in the price of Anthropic tokens in under five months.
Falling token prices cut into earnings
Darkbloom describes itself as a decentralised AI inference network, meaning it runs already-trained models to produce answers rather than training them. It aggregates and sells spare compute capacity from Macs, and it has told members to expect revenues to fall as token prices continue to drop.
According to The Register, the price per million Anthropic tokens fell from $2.65 in May to $0.62 in October 2026, a decline of 77% in under five months. Tom's Hardware reports that Mac users sharing compute for inference are already seeing declining income as a result.
Darkbloom's leaderboard offers a sense of scale. The best-case earnings estimate for an M5 Pro Mac Mini with 64GB of unified memory is as much as $192 per month, but the median for the top 50 operators is about $159.86 per month. That works out to about $5.26 a day, or $1,918.50 a year.
Client priorities favour higher-end chips
Darkbloom's primary client, OpenRouter, has started prioritising decode speed, quantisation and prefill speed. According to Tom's Hardware, this puts owners without a top-of-the-line Max or Ultra Apple chip at a disadvantage.
Darkbloom says it will not stand by and let some users lose out because of these changes. The network is analysing model demand to advise members on which models are in higher demand right now.
Token volume is rising alongside falling prices
Tom's Hardware notes that AI token prices are falling faster than Moore's Law, with some reports saying AI is becoming 50% cheaper every quarter. Companies running through annual AI budgets within months, however, is attributed less to per-token prices than to the number of tokens consumed, as agentic AI use, which carries out multi-step tasks, outpaces those price drops.
Open questions
- Will the model-demand guidance offset lower token prices for owners without high-end chips?
- Will token prices keep falling at the recent pace?