On August 4, Grant de Swardt, an independent AI consultant in East Sussex, UK, noticed something strange going on with his Claude Max 20x account. He hadn’t been working that day, yet his token usage was climbing.
The next day, he disabled everything he had attached to Claude and did not work with it. Token consumption again increased. “In the clearest controlled interval, it increased from 45% to 55% while I performed no work, scheduled Cowork tasks were paused or completed, Dispatch/cloud execution was disabled, and there was no corresponding active local Claude Code task,” de Swardt told TechCrunch.
