A climate scientist has conducted an experiment to measure the energy usage of AI agents, finding that they consume significantly more energy than simple chat prompts. The scientist tracked his usage of the AI model Claude Code over eight weeks, resulting in 3.2 billion tokens and 170 kWh of data center electricity. This data highlights the disparity between reported energy usage figures from companies like Google and OpenAI, which may underestimate the actual energy consumption of AI agents. This discrepancy has implications for the environmental impact of AI technology.