Apple quietly cut the daily amount some of its engineers can spend on AI tools from $300 to $200 last month, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, and deeper cuts are on the table. The caps cover tokens, the units of text and data that AI models chew through with every request, behind tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, which Apple staff use for coding and other work.

For the richest company on earth, $100 a day per engineer is pocket change. That’s exactly why the cut is worth paying attention to.

What changed inside Apple

Last month, Apple lowered the daily spending cap for some engineers using AI models to $200 from $300, according to people with knowledge of the change who spoke to Bloomberg on condition of anonymity because the discussions are private. Bloomberg put it plainly: “Last month, Apple quietly lowered the daily spending cap for some engineers using AI models to $200 from $300, according to people with knowledge of the change.” More cuts are being planned: some engineering teams could see their daily allowances fall to $100.

Groups outside engineering already live under tighter limits. Many face a $100 daily cap today, and Apple has considered cutting that to as little as $25 for some teams, the report said. Employees who need more can ask senior executives for an exemption.

Apple didn’t respond to a Reuters request for comment on the report, and Bloomberg reported that the company declined to comment. The timing matters. Bloomberg’s report landed the same week Apple filed its annual report, which showed research and development expenses up 32% in fiscal 2026, driven by higher infrastructure and AI costs.

Don’t expect the savings to show up as a line item anyone can point to. Some employees told Bloomberg that few of them were burning through the full $300 allowance in the first place, so the actual money saved may be small. A cap that nobody hits doesn’t cut costs. It sends a message.

Why Ternus is tightening the screws

John Ternus took over as Apple’s chief executive on September 1, and the AI budget cuts fit the pattern of his first two months in the job. Bloomberg places the change inside a broader cost-cutting push, the same one it described in September when it reported that Ternus was dismissing engineering program managers to run Apple leaner.

Ternus has talked about reducing corporate hierarchy and bloat so Apple can do more with fewer people. Capping AI spending is a small, visible way to make that point inside the company: even the tools Apple is betting its future on aren’t exempt from the new discipline.

There’s a real tension here. Apple wants AI at the center of its operations, and it’s spending heavily to get there — that 32% jump in R&D spending says so. But the company also wants to stop paying top dollar for employees to run expensive third-party models when cheaper options exist. MacRumors noted that Apple is asking some teams to use less expensive models or switch to on-device AI instead.

Engineers get the biggest budgets because coding eats tokens faster than almost any other kind of AI work. A long debugging session with an AI coding assistant can rack up thousands of tokens in an hour, and those tokens bill by the million. At $200 a day, an engineer working 250 days a year still has a $50,000 annual allowance. The old $300 cap was worth $75,000.

Apple isn’t alone

Apple is the latest big tech company to put its employees on an AI allowance, not the first. Microsoft has set token budgets for every division and switched its default internal model to a cheaper one. Tesla imposed a $200 weekly limit on employee AI spending. Uber capped individual AI coding tools at $1,500 a month after burning through its entire 2026 Claude Code budget by April. Meta introduced token budgets and nudged staff toward its in-house tools, while Goldman Sachs has restricted access to some AI coding tools.

That list tells its own story. Two years ago, companies handed out AI coding tools like office supplies and worried about the bill later. Later has arrived. The tools work — engineers won’t give them up — but the meter runs fast, and finance departments have started watching it.

Uber’s case is the sharpest warning. Blowing an annual budget for one tool by April is the kind of overspend that turns a perk into a policy. Apple’s $300-to-$200 cut looks modest next to it, and the fact that some Apple staff weren’t even hitting the old cap suggests Cupertino is moving early, before the bill forces its hand.

Why this matters

Watch what happens next, not what just happened. A $200 cap is a signal; a $100 cap for engineers and a $25 cap for everyone else would be a policy with teeth, and Bloomberg’s reporting says both are under consideration.

For Apple, the stakes go beyond the budget line. The company is rebuilding Siri around AI, pushing Apple Intelligence deeper into its devices, and leaning on outside models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) while its own systems catch up. Rationing those same tools internally, even lightly, is an awkward look, and it will feed the same questions employees are already asking about layoffs and cost cuts under a new chief executive.

For the rest of the industry, Apple’s move is another data point in a shift that started this year: the age of unlimited AI spending inside big tech is ending. Companies aren’t abandoning AI tools. Nobody is going back to writing boilerplate by hand. But they’re starting to treat tokens like any other metered resource, with budgets, cheaper defaults and exemptions that require a boss’s signature.

That’s a healthy correction, up to a point. The risk is that the cheapest model wins the budget even when it isn’t the best tool for the job, and that the engineers doing the hardest work hit their cap first. Apple’s answer, for now, is that anyone who truly needs more can ask. How often those asks get approved will say more about the new Apple than the $200 number does.

Sources: Bloomberg, Reuters, TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, MacRumors

FAQ

How much can Apple engineers spend on AI tools each day?

Some Apple engineers now have a $200 daily cap on AI spending, down from $300 in October. Further cuts could take some engineering teams to $100 a day, and some non-engineering teams to as little as $25.

Which AI tools do Apple’s spending caps cover?

The caps cover AI tokens — the units of text and data models process — for tools including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, which Apple employees use for coding and other work.

Why is Apple cutting employee AI budgets?

Bloomberg places the cuts inside CEO John Ternus’s broader cost-cutting push. Apple’s research and development spending rose 32% in fiscal 2026, driven by higher infrastructure and AI costs.

Are other tech companies cutting AI spending too?

Yes. Microsoft has set token budgets for its divisions, Tesla caps employee AI spending at $200 a week, Uber limits individual AI coding tools to $1,500 a month, and Meta has introduced token budgets of its own.