Apple engineers lose a third of their daily AI budget

In October, Apple reportedly cut the daily limit for spending on AI tools by its engineering teams from $300 to $200.

Further cuts are on the way, with some engineering teams potentially dropping to $100 a day.

Some non-engineering teams could fall to a $25 cap

Many groups not in engineering are already capped at $100 per day. Some teams have been considered for a reduction to $25, people familiar with the change said.

Staff requiring more can apply for an exemption via senior leadership.

The cut is about a third of the daily budget. This is a big turnabout for a company that built AI into the way its engineers write and debug code.

Budgets cover token spending, which is what AI models read and generate.

Writing code burns through tokens quickly.

Apple staff can access Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Some teams are prodded towards cheaper models, or models that run locally on their machines.

Apple extensively employed Anthropic’s models for internal work even as it partnered with Google to power Siri. “All of us are using AI in a significant way already, and we must use it as a company as well,” former CEO Tim Cook told employees at an all-hands meeting.

Few staff were spending their full $300 allowance

Cuts are part of CEO John Ternus’ effort to cut costs. Ternus, who started the top job on Sept. 1, has since cut layers of management and pushed divisions to move faster.

Some units engaged outside consultants to see how efficient they are. Apple’s R&D bill rose 32% to $45.8 billion in fiscal 2026, a climb partly fueled by spending on AI and infrastructure.

Operating expenses increased 22% to $75.5 billion. It’s unclear how much Apple will save since few employees were using their full $300 anyway, according to people familiar with the matter.

Inside Apple, reactions are split. Some workers interpret the cap as a warning sign on jobs after Apple cut more than 200 roles in August.

Silicon Valley has been consumed by “tokenmaxxing” over the past year, the loose proxy for productivity that involves burning as many tokens as possible. Meta even had internal leaderboards ranking employees by usage.

The trend took off as coding tools such as Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and Cursor caught on with developers.

Microsoft allocated each division an AI budget in July. Tesla caps employees at $200 a week.

Uber budgets $1,500 a month for each AI coding tool. Accenture trimmed its centrally funded Claude allowance to $29 per employee, per month, with the rest billed to project teams.

In September, Cryptopolitan reported that Apple was promoting its new Mac mini and Mac Studio desktops to businesses as local AI machines with “no cost per token,” said hardware chief Johny Srouji. Apple’s tight control over AI spending was noted last year.