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THE LINUX FOUNDATION PROJECTS
Date
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Location
The Westin St. Francis,
San Francisco
Format
Chatham House
Rule
Attendance
Invite-Only,
100 delegates

State of Tokenomics SF: the economics of AI.

Tokenomics Foundation is hosting an invite only event for Tokenomics experts to explore the current State of Tokenomics alongside its Governing Board and Technical Steering Committee, plus invited guests.

Apply to Attend  →
By Invitation Only / No Sales or Marketing
The Forum

A debate on the State of AI Economics

The discipline to drive value needs to keep pace with the adoption

On September 23 in Amsterdam we released the State of Tokenomics, the first vendor-neutral survey of how organizations produce, consume, and prove value from AI tokens. More than 400 organizations answered. A few things they told us:

  • Most cannot connect AI spend to a business outcome their CFO would accept.
  • The C-suite and the FinOps teams working the bill disagree on how well value is being measured. The gap is statistically significant, and it widens as companies get bigger.
  • Organizations running a model router are about three times more confident in both their spend visibility and their CFO-grade outcomes than those that are not.
  • Token providers and rented GPUs are bought together, not instead of each other. Cloud token providers skew to frontier models; rented and private hardware skews to open weight.

San Francisco is where we take those findings apart. One day, in a room with the people on both sides of the production function: the large token consumers paying the bill, and the labs, clouds, and hardware providers producing what they buy.

The Tokenomics Foundation is the vendor-neutral, community-built home for the primitives of AI economics. If you produce tokens or pay for them, you should be in the room.

Attendees

Who should be in the room.

Operators selling or buying inference.

Researchers working on pricing, allocation, and compute economics.

Infrastructure teams converting watt into tokens.

Product and finance leads whose AI bill is now a P&L line item.

Labs shipping and pricing frontier models.

Platform teams building the infrastructure inference runs on.

If your company meters, manages and monetizes AI, this is the session.

Program

A working morning, not a conference.

8:00
Registration and arrival
Attendees receive the room's anonymized composition brief on arrival: sectors, spend bands, and open questions submitted in advance.
Networking
9:00 - 9:25
Welcome and State of Tokenomics
A preview of the State of the Tokenomics practice globally, presented by the Tokenomics Foundation research team.
Talk
9:25 - 9:50
Academic session: measuring AI economics
A researcher presents peer-reviewed work on the measurement of AI cost and value, opened to questions from the room.
Academic
9:50 - 10:15
Talk: Pricing, provisioning, and routing AI
How AI workloads are priced, provisioned, routed, and sold, and where the economics diverge from cloud.
Talk
10:15 - 10:40
Talk: The model portfolio problem
Unit economics of agentic workloads and how enterprises are managing a growing portfolio of models and vendors.
Talk
10:40 - 11:25
Practitioner panel: proving ROI on AI
Three practitioners on how their teams are measuring returns, what they stopped measuring, and where the day-to-day work has moved.
Panel
11:25 - 12:25
Discussion forums: AI Production, Consumption, Value
Three parallel tracks, capped at 24 seats each: token governance and policy, unit economics of agentic workloads, and the model portfolio problem.
Tracks
12:25 - 13:45
Networking Lunch
Attendees close the morning over lunch, continuing conversations from the forums.
Networking
How it Works

Three rules the room runs on.

i.

Chatham House Rule

Attendees may use what they hear. They may not identify who said it. Nothing is recorded, nothing is broadcast, and the roster stays with the Foundation.

ii.

Curated by application

Every seat is reviewed by the program committee. The composition of the room is the product. Vendor and supplier seats are extremely limited, and are held for the few whose presence the room asked for.

iii.

Vendor-neutral by charter

The Tokenomics Foundation is a project of the Linux Foundation. No sales people, no marketing people, no product pitches, no sponsored keynotes, no vendor track. Working sessions only.

Venue

Union Square, in the heart of San Francisco.

The Westin St. Francis, San Francisco
The Westin St. Francis
335 Powell Street, San Francisco, CA. Floor details and access instructions go out with the invitation.

The venue is a working room. No stage, no theater seating, no exhibit floor. Round tables, a shared whiteboard, and one screen. The building was chosen because it is quiet, it is private, and it is close to the offices most attendees are already coming from.

Apply

Request an invitation.

Applications open through September 20, 2026. The program committee reviews on a rolling basis. Successful applicants are notified within two weeks, with a hold placed on the date until the invitation is accepted.

Begin an Application  →

Questions on eligibility? Write to us directly.