Remember when every company was telling employees to use as much AI as possible? That era seems to be ending, and Apple is the latest sign. According to a Bloomberg report Wednesday, picked up by TechCrunch, Apple is cutting how much its teams can spend on AI tools each day.
Here's what that looks like. In October, Apple lowered the daily AI spending cap for its engineering teams from $300 a person to $200. More cuts are coming, with some allowances set to drop to $100 a day, according to Bloomberg's sources. For people outside engineering, Apple is reportedly considering a limit as low as $25 a day. Apple hasn't commented.
If $200 a day still sounds like a lot, it helps to know how these tools are billed. AI services charge by the token, basically chunks of text the model reads and writes. Coding assistants that read big chunks of a codebase, or agents that work on a task for a long time, can burn through tokens fast. Multiply that by thousands of engineers and the monthly bill gets very real, very quickly.
TechCrunch frames it as part of a bigger swing. Early this year, a lot of companies pushed staff to max out their AI use, a trend people jokingly called "tokenmaxxing." Now the bills have arrived, and companies are rationing. There's also a growing debate about whether the money spent on AI is really paying off in productivity, or whether it just feels productive.
It's an interesting look behind the curtain at Apple, a company that's under pressure to prove it can keep up in AI while also keeping costs in check.