Apple has cut how much its own engineers may spend on AI each day, and is preparing to cut further, according to a Bloomberg report. The company lowered the daily cap for some engineers to $200 from $300 in October, the report said, with more reductions in the works that would take some allowances to $100 a day. Outside engineering, Apple is said to be weighing a limit as low as $25 a day. Apple has not commented publicly on the report, which cites people familiar with the change.

The numbers describe a company that is not abandoning AI but metering it. Three hundred dollars a day is not a token allowance for a single developer: at frontier-model prices it funds long agentic coding sessions, repository-wide refactors, generated test suites and the extended runs that burn tokens fastest. A ceiling of $100 cuts out the work the agents were bought for, not the novelty use.

The move follows a year of what the industry called tokenmaxxing, when companies pushed staff to use AI as much as possible in the name of vaguely defined efficiency. Then the invoices arrived and rationing replaced the mandate. What remains unresolved is the measurement problem: most organisations still cannot show cleanly whether the tokens they bought produced output, which makes a daily cap the administrative answer to an accounting question.

A useful counter-example comes from a company that sells AI rather than consumes it. Figma reported third-quarter revenue of $391.4 million, up 43% year on year, and raised its 2026 outlook to $1.497–1.499 billion. Weekly AI credit consumption across Figma, excluding beta usage, rose 2.5x between the Figma Agent's general availability on 6 October and 31 October, the company said; shares still fell about 6% after hours. The difference is where the meter sits. At Figma the credits are the product, so rising consumption is revenue. At Apple the tokens are an input cost that has to be justified against a productivity gain nobody can attribute.

For the vendors selling coding agents, that is the more awkward number. Apple's margin discipline is the industry's reference point. If the cap inside Apple sits at $100 to $200 per engineer per day, that is a defensible estimate of what enterprises will actually pay per developer seat, and it undercuts the assumption of unbounded per-seat expansion that a good part of the sector's valuation rests on.

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