Meta’s Adam Mosseri, who heads Instagram, said the company may need to cap AI token budgets per engineer within a year or two, as a strong engineer’s token burn rate could match their salary, according to TechCrunch. Mosseri framed AI tokens as a resource to allocate like payroll, GPUs, and operating expenses, with any per-engineer cap set in proportion to how much the company trusts them to spend it in an “ROI-positive” way. Meta has no token caps today but recently shut down an internal token-spend leaderboard as its AI costs headed toward billions of dollars in 2026. Similar cost reckonings have hit Uber, which blew through its 2026 AI coding budget, and Microsoft, which cut Claude Code licenses in favor of its own Copilot tool.
