Artificial Intelligence1 min read

Apple CEO John Ternus has a new AI rule for his engineers

By · Via Times of India · Published by Everything Blog

In short

Daily AI tool allowances for certain Apple engineers have been cut from $300 to $200, with further plans to reduce budgets for some technical groups down to $100. Non-engineering teams could also see their current $100 limits plummet to $25 per day. The restrictions require employees to seek senior management exemptions if they exceed their quotas, or to rely on on-device models over external options like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. These austerity measures have triggered internal anxiety among workers who view the spending limits as a potential precursor to layoffs.

Key points

  • Apple staff must now obtain senior leadership exemptions if their daily token consumption…: Apple staff must now obtain senior leadership exemptions if their daily token consumption exceeds newly imposed spending caps.
  • Employees are being steered away from third-party tools like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT…: Employees are being steered away from third-party tools like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT toward cheaper, on-device alternatives.
  • The spending restrictions align Apple with peers like Microsoft, Tesla, Uber, and Meta in…: The spending restrictions align Apple with peers like Microsoft, Tesla, Uber, and Meta in rationing workplace artificial intelligence usage.

Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1

Apple is putting a tighter limit on how much its employees can spend on AI tools at work. Last month, the iPhone maker quietly cut the daily AI spending cap for some of its engineers from $300 to $200, according to a Bloomberg report. Engineers who need more than that will now have to seek an exemption from senior leadership. The change is part of a wider cost-cutting push at Apple. It comes even as the company is asking employees to bring AI deeper into how they write code and run day-to-day operations.

The cuts may not end there. Apple is planning to bring daily allowances for some engineering teams down to as little as $100, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. Many teams outside engineering already work with a $100 daily cap, and Apple has considered lowering that to just $25 for some of them.

These budgets are measured in tokens, the units of text and data an AI model processes with every request. Providers bill by the token, and advanced models cost more. Coding eats through tokens…

Artificial Intelligence