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Report: Apple reduces employees’ AI token allowances as Ternus moves to cut costs
Bloomberg reports that Apple has begun reducing employees’ daily AI spending limits, with some engineers seeing their allowances cut from $300 to $200, and further reductions planned across multiple teams. Here are the details.
Over the past year, tokenmaxxing, the practice of consuming as many AI tokens as possible, often as a measure of productivity, took over Silicon Valley, with companies such as Meta even introducing internal leaderboards, some unofficial, ranking employees by their AI token usage.
Tokenmaxxing emerged alongside improvements in AI agents’ coding capabilities, as tools such as Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Cursor became increasingly popular among software developers.
Unsurprisingly, companies soon began to rein in token usage as the rising costs of AI tools raised questions about whether the productivity gains justified the expense. Just recently, Accenture reportedly reduced its centrally funded Claude allowance to just $29 per employee per month, requiring any additional spending to be covered by individual projects or teams.
And while there hadn’t been reports of disproportionate token usage from engineers and other employees at Apple, Bloomberg reported today that the company is also looking to rein in employees’ AI spending as part of CEO John Ternus’ broader cost-cutting efforts.
Last month, Apple quietly lowered the daily spending cap for some engineers using AI models to $200 from $300, according to people with knowledge of the change. The company is now planning further cuts for some engineering teams, potentially reducing their daily allowances to as little as $100, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private.
Many groups outside of engineering already face a $100 daily cap, but Apple has considered reducing that limit to as little as $25 for some teams, the people said. Employees who require higher allowances to perform their jobs will be able to seek exemptions from senior leadership.
It is not immediately clear which tools are affected by the new spending limits. However, Bloomberg reports that Apple employees have access to several AI services, including Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini. Some teams are also being encouraged to use cheaper AI models or models that run locally on their devices to reduce costs.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman had previously said that Apple was heavily reliant on Anthropic’s AI models for its internal operations, describing the company as essentially “running on Anthropic,” despite its partnership with Google to power Siri.
That came a few months after then-CEO Tim Cook encouraged employees to make greater use of AI in their daily work during an all-hands meeting, saying, “All of us are using AI in a significant way already, and we must use it as a company as well.”