The More It Says, the More You Pay: A Black-Box Audit of Provider-Side Token Inflation in LLM Services

arXiv:2609.20370 · cs.CR · Submitted 2026-09-17 · Read on arXiv

cs.CR

Submitted: 2026-09-17

Updated: 2026-09-17

Comments: 22 pages, 10 figures, 8 tables

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• AUC — 14× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 9× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Calibration — 7× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 5× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Benchmark — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Token Inflation Ratio — 4× in this paper
• Aggregation — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Provider-Side Token Inflation Attack — 3× in this paper
• Tokenization — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Trace — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accountability — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adaptation — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Cooperation — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Embeddings — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Lightweight Semantic Elaboration Attack — 2× in this paper
• Prefix-Based Overthinking Attack — 2× in this paper
• Redundancy — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Steering — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Commentary — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Consistency — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Failure Modes — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Generative Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generative Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Quantization — 1× in this paper · explained in 12 episodes

Sources

• State of AI: An Empirical 100 Trillion Token Study with OpenRouter
• Are You Getting What You Pay For? Auditing Model Substitution in LLM APIs
• POT: Inducing Overthinking in LLMs via Black-Box Iterative Optimization
• Behavioral Consistency and Transparency Analysis on Large Language Model API Gateways
• Token Inflation: How Dishonest Providers Can Overcharge for Large Language Model Usage
• OverThink: Slowdown Attacks on Reasoning LLMs
• The Llama 3 Herd of Models
• Test-Time Compute Games
• Is Your LLM Overcharging You? Tokenization, Transparency, and Incentives
• Ministral 3
• Predictive Auditing of Hidden Tokens in LLM APIs via Reasoning Length Estimation
• Qwen3 Technical Report
• Excessive Reasoning Attack on Reasoning LLMs
• CoIn: Counting the Invisible Reasoning Tokens in Commercial Opaque LLM APIs
• Real Money, Fake Models: Deceptive Model Claims in Shadow APIs

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