The Hallucination Tax

How much of your AI is defensible?

Most enterprises see one line on their AI invoice: total spend. This calculator splits it into two — defensible spend, and the hallucination tax. In under three minutes, get a directional read on what fraction of your AI bill is producing auditable, source-grounded outputs.

33%

OpenAI o3 hallucination rate on PersonQA — double its predecessor o1 (16%). Source: OpenAI system card, April 2025.

100x

Growth in enterprise AI token consumption over two years — while unit prices fell 10x. Jevons paradox in inference. Source: VentureBeat / Nutanix, April 2026.

5.5%

Share of enterprises seeing significant financial value from AI. The other 94.5% are in pilot purgatory. Source: McKinsey State of AI, 2025.

Inputs

Calculate your Cost Per Defensible Output.

Tell us about your AI spend. We’ll split it into defensible spend and the hallucination tax. Estimates are fine — this is a directional model, not a precision instrument.

$

Total token, API and model spend across vendors.

Approximate is fine. Don’t know? Estimate.

Workflow type
Source visibility
Per-output confidence scoring
Methodology

A directional model, not a precision instrument.

The CPDO model gives credit for the two capabilities that determine whether an output is defensible: source visibility and per-output confidence scoring. Both are architecturally enabled by Seekr. The calibration is deliberately conservative — the point is not to predict your invoice to the dollar, but to force AI spend onto a CFO’s screen in two columns instead of one.

  • Traceable — the contributing Q&A pairs or source documents that influenced the output can be identified.
  • Source-attributed — each contributing source can be inspected and ranked by influence.
  • Confidence-scored — the output carries a confidence value the operator can act on: accept, route to review, or reject.