Apple is reportedly cutting budgets for its internal AI usage

Key points

• Apple lowered its engineering teams' daily AI spending cap from $300 to $200 in October, Bloomberg reported.
• Some allowances could fall to $100 a day, and non-engineering limits may drop to $25 a day.
• The cuts follow a broader industry pullback from heavy AI spending as token bills came due.

Apple has reduced the daily amount its engineering teams can spend on AI, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. In October, the company lowered the daily cap from $300 to $200, according to the outlet.

Further reductions are reportedly planned. Some allowances could fall to $100 a day, and Apple is said to be weighing a daily limit as low as $25 for teams outside engineering.

A shift after heavy AI use

The change marks a notable turn for a company that has worked to bring AI into its engineering processes. Earlier this year, many companies encouraged staff to use AI as much as possible in pursuit of loosely defined efficiency gains, a period the article describes as a surge of "tokenmaxxing."

That push was short-lived, the report says, as the bills for AI usage came due and companies concluded that rationing tokens might be the more fiscally sensible approach.

token rationing might be a more fiscally sensible approach

— TechCrunch

Costs versus productivity

Questions remain about an apparent gap between what AI costs to build and run and the productivity gains it is expected to deliver, which the article describes as often unclear.