Bloomberg reported on 4 November 2026 that Apple is lowering what employees may spend on AI models each day, as part of cost cutting under CEO John Ternus, who took over on 1 September. In October the cap for some engineers was quietly cut, according to people familiar with the change, from $300 to $200. Further cuts are planned for some engineering teams, possibly down to $100 a day.
“All of us are using AI in a significant way already, and we must use it as a company as well.”
Tim Cook, then Apple CEO, at an all-hands meeting · 9to5mac.com ↗
Outside engineering, many groups already sit at $100, and Apple has weighed taking some to $25. Engineers get the biggest budgets because coding with AI burns through tokens. Anyone needing more can ask senior leadership for an exemption. Staff can use Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and other models, and it is unclear which tools the limits cover. Some teams are being pushed towards cheaper models or ones that run on the device, and Apple has brought in outside productivity consultants for some divisions.
The savings may be modest, since few workers used their full $300. Some employees see the cuts as a sign of broader cost cutting and worry about layoffs, and Ternus reportedly wants less hierarchy and more done by fewer people. Apple's research and development spending rose 32% to $45.8bn in its fiscal fourth quarter of 2026, helped by infrastructure and AI costs. Accenture has reportedly cut its central Claude allowance to $29 per employee a month.
About Apple
Ternus, a 25-year Apple veteran who previously ran hardware engineering, succeeded Tim Cook after Cook's 15 years as CEO. His first weeks have been marked by trimming. Bloomberg reported in late September that Apple had weighed replacing about 5,000 AppleCare support jobs with AI agents, then put the plan on hold.
Apple's hardware engineering division also cut several programme manager roles, about six at director level, and reportedly cut staff in Siri, Vision Pro and AI software engineering. On his last earnings call as CEO, Cook called rising memory prices a "100-year flood" while Apple reported record fiscal third-quarter revenue of $109.4bn.
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The turn is sharp after a stretch of "tokenmaxxing", treating heavy token use as a productivity measure, which spread through Silicon Valley, with Meta running internal usage leaderboards. Tim Cook had urged Apple staff to lean on AI, and Bloomberg has earlier said Apple was largely running on Anthropic internally despite its Google partnership for Siri.
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