Apple cuts employees' daily AI limit from $300 to $200, weighs $100 and $25 for some teams
First seen on X 17 hours ago@markgurman ♥ 1,55514 views
Apple is trimming employee AI spending. Bloomberg reported Nov. 4 that Apple cut some engineers' daily AI limit from $300 to $200 last month and plans to lower it to $100. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said some teams could see $25 (about 1,500 likes).
According to MacRumors' summary, many groups outside engineering already have a $100 daily limit. Apple is asking some teams to use cheaper models or on-device AI, and employees who need more can ask executives. Staff can use Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and others. Some employees told Bloomberg few people use the full $300, so savings may be small. Apple has also brought outside productivity consultants into some divisions, which fuels restructuring worries. John Ternus took over as CEO Sept. 1 and reportedly wants less hierarchy.
Others are tightening too. UK fintech Revolut said it cut AI coding inference costs about 90% for roughly 2,000 engineers by switching to self-hosted GLM, an open-weight model from China's Z.ai, at about $0.30 per million tokens, around a tenth of Claude Code or Codex, The Register reported. Bloomberg reported Goldman Sachs limited Claude Code and GitHub to engineers last month. Anthropic's IPO filing said internal Claude use, valued at retail prices, passed employee monthly pay in April.
On X, replies included "that's about $4,000 a month; give them 256GB Mac Studios instead" and "how much would it cost Apple to run open-weight models on its own compute?"
“NEW: Apple is cutting employee AI spending budgets even as it pushes workers to use the technology more.”
