Apple cuts employee AI budgets as usage costs climb

Apple is tightening internal AI budgets to deal with fast-rising AI costs. The company has already cut some engineers' daily AI spending cap from $300 to $200, a 33% drop.

It plans to cut limits further, possibly to $100 a day for some teams, and may lower some non-engineering teams from $100 to just $25. Employees who need more can ask senior management for an exception.

These budgets cover tokens, the units of text and code that AI models process. AI providers charge by token use, and bigger models cost more. Writing and debugging code burns through limits fast.

Apple staff currently use Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, but some teams must switch to cheaper models or run AI locally. Microsoft, Tesla, Uber, and Meta have also tightened AI spending, as the industry shifts from free experimentation to careful cost counting.