AI capability is now something every company buys, and no one can say what it should cost. Prices are quoted in tokens, they change constantly, and every party who could tell you whether you're paying a fair rate has a reason not to. The labs want you on their model. The routers want your traffic. The billing tools show you what you spent, not whether you should have. There is no neutral reference. So we're building one.
The Cambent Token Index (TKX) is a live, independent benchmark for the cost of AI capability, measured task by task and grounded in real prices and published performance data. It's the barrel-of-oil price for intelligence: a published number the market can point to, argue with, and price against. On top of it, our tools let any company see its own AI spend measured against that benchmark, so a finance or engineering lead can finally answer a question they can't answer today. Is this a fair rate for what we're getting.
The index is live now. It updates every day. Anyone can see it.
Neutrality is the whole point. An index is only worth something if no one can lean on it. We don't route your traffic, we don't sell model access, and no provider can pay to change how they score. We measure; you decide. The day we compromise that is the day the number stops meaning anything, so we won't.
Transparency is how trust is earned. A reference number that hides its method is just an opinion. We publish how the index is built, name our sources, and show what we've verified and what we haven't. We would rather show an honest gap than a confident guess. Anyone should be able to check our work.
Better than anyone, or it doesn't count. Being independent isn't enough. To be the number people cite, the index has to be more accurate, more current, and more rigorous than any alternative a conflicted party could publish. That standard is the job.
We are not a router, and we are not a tollbooth. The value that accrues to whoever sits on the flow of AI traffic is real, and it's being captured. We're deliberately not there. Cambent sits above the flow, not in it, because the moment we touch it we can no longer be trusted to price it.
Every actor that spends money on intelligence needs to know what it costs. Companies do today. Agents already do. Robots will, once a machine weighing whether to perform a task has to price the intelligence that task requires against what it earns. A real-time, trusted signal for the cost of capability, and a way to act on it, stops being a convenience and becomes infrastructure. That's the company we're building toward.
Cambent, Inc. is an early-stage company. The index and our first tools are live and in the hands of real users. We're building the team that turns a working index into the reference standard for an entire category.