Apple slashes employee AI token budgets from $300 to $200 a day, with $100 next

Macworld reports that Apple has reduced the daily AI usage cap for its engineers from $300 to $200, with plans to go to $100. Non-engineering teams may be capped at $25 per day. Internal guidance pushes staff toward cheaper models and on-device inference instead of premium frontier APIs.

The numbers show how expensive agentic coding has become inside large companies. A $300 daily cap works out to more than $70,000 per engineer per year if fully used, comparable to a junior salary. Apple's approach is to set budgets per person and push work toward cheaper models.

This fits a clear pattern this week:

- Anthropic shipped project cost tags so enterprises can attribute Claude spending to internal codes.

- AWS now amortizes GPU Capacity Block costs in its billing reports.

- Investors are marking down Anthropic's IPO valuation on unit-economics concerns.

Perplexity's CEO is pushing the opposite way: Aravind Srinivas says the median Perplexity employee now gets seven times more agent-hours a week than in September. Big companies are rationing while AI-native startups are maximizing usage.

The reporting is unconfirmed by Apple and based on internal sources. Watch whether other large tech employers follow, and whether lower caps measurably slow Apple's internal AI-assisted development, which is already under scrutiny given Siri AI's delays.