Meta will cap employees' AI token usage and track their spending in real time after telling staff in a Tuesday memo that internal AI use is on track to cost billions in 2026, according to The Information. The move reverses months of pushing AI adoption, even making “AI-driven impact” a core job expectation, and Meta is building a dashboard called AI Gateway with budgets, spending alerts, and a nudge toward its in-house MetaCode tool over outside ones like Anthropic's Claude. The clampdown follows employees gaming an internal leaderboard called Claudeonomics that ranked the top 250 by token use, with some inflating usage until staff burned 73.7 trillion tokens in a month, and it mirrors caps at Uber and ServiceNow, which exhausted their annual Anthropic budgets within months.
