Apple has reportedly reduced the daily limit its engineering teams may spend on AI tools from $300 to $200, according to people familiar with the matter. The change took effect in October, and further reductions are on the way: some engineering teams could see their caps drop to $100 a day.

The tightening extends beyond engineering. Many groups outside engineering are already capped at $100 per day, and some of those teams have been considered for a reduction to $25, people familiar with the change said. Staff who require more capacity can apply for an exemption through senior leadership. Whether the flagged deeper cuts take effect — and how many staff seek exemptions — will show how far the squeeze reaches.

The reduction amounts to roughly a third of the daily budget — a notable turnabout for a company that has built AI into the way its engineers write and debug code. The budgets cover token spending, the text that AI models read and generate, and writing code consumes tokens quickly.

Apple staff can access Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and OpenAI's ChatGPT. Some teams are being prodded toward cheaper models, or models that run locally on their machines. The economics differ sharply: token-based services bill by usage, while locally run models avoid per-token charges altogether. Apple has 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.

The cuts form part of an efficiency drive by CEO John Ternus, who took over the top job on Sept. 1 and has since cut layers of management and pushed divisions to move faster. Some units have engaged outside consultants to assess how efficient they are. Apple's R&D bill rose 32% to $45.8 billion in fiscal 2026, a climb fueled in part by spending on AI and infrastructure, according to its SEC filing. Operating expenses increased 22% to $75.5 billion.

Actual savings may be limited, since few employees were spending their full $300 allowance anyway, according to people familiar with the matter.

Reactions inside Apple are split. Some workers interpret the cap as a warning sign for jobs, coming after the company cut more than 200 roles in August.

The move lands amid a Silicon Valley phenomenon dubbed “tokenmaxxing” over the past year — a loose proxy for productivity that involves burning as many tokens as possible. Meta even maintained 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.

Apple is not alone in reining in AI spending. 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 remainder billed to project teams. The pattern shows how quickly AI coding access has shifted from an open perk to a metered budget line at major companies.

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,” according to hardware chief Johny Srouji. Apple's tight control over AI spending was noted as early as last year.