Apple Cuts Engineers' Daily AI Spending Cap to $200 and Weighs Further Limits

The first cut took effect last month, and further reductions could bring the cap for some engineering teams down to $100 a day, according to the report. Many groups outside engineering already work under a $100 daily limit, and Apple has considered lowering that to $25 for some teams. The budgets are measured in tokens, the units of text and data that AI models process and that providers use to set their fees.

The move is a sign of how quickly spending on AI tools has become a line item that large companies want to control. Apple has pushed staff to adopt AI across their work, and employees have access to Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, Bloomberg reported. Some teams are now being directed to cheaper models or to models that run locally on devices.

Employees who need more than their allowance can ask senior leadership for an exemption. Engineers who use AI for writing and debugging software, which can consume large numbers of tokens on complex, data-heavy tasks, are among those most affected.

The savings may be modest. People familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that few workers used their full $300 daily allowance, making the old limit more generous than it needed to be. Others inside the company read the change as part of a broader cost-cutting effort and worry it could foreshadow layoffs, according to the report. Some divisions have hired outside consultants to review their efficiency and operations.

An Apple spokesperson declined to comment, Bloomberg said.

The cuts come under John Ternus, Apple's new chief executive, who is pushing for a faster, leaner company with fewer layers of management. Apple's research and development expenses rose 32% in fiscal 2026, driven by infrastructure and AI costs, and operating expenses rose 22% to $75.5 billion, or 16% of net sales.

Apple is not alone in rationing employee AI use. Microsoft has tightened internal AI spending allowances, Tesla has set a $200 weekly limit on employee AI spending, Uber has capped individual use of AI coding tools at $1,500 a month, and Meta has introduced token budgets while encouraging staff to switch to its internally developed tools, according to Bloomberg.

For AI developers such as Anthropic and OpenAI, whose enterprise revenue depends heavily on coding and agent workloads billed by the token, tighter budgets at large customers are a demand signal worth watching. Apple has not said whether the limits apply differently across the outside models its staff use.