AT&T Throttles Some Employees’ AI Usage as ‘Tokenminimizing’ Arrives

As AI spending has eaten into corporate budgets, generating concern over rising costs at Fortune 500 firms from Uber to ServiceNow and Snowflake, some companies are beginning to throttle employees’ usage. 

The latest is AT&T, which has begun limiting some employees’ access to Microsoft’s Github Copilot, according to a person at the company. In a more striking example, Meta is also limiting employees’ AI spending on services from Anthropic and other providers, a sharp reversal from a few months ago when employees competed with each other to use as much AI as possible, known as tokenmaxxing, my colleague Jyoti reported Friday. 

Uber and Walmart similarly capped employee usage of AI coding tools, Bloomberg recently reported. And the Financial Times reported that Amazon has scrapped its “leader board” that ranked employees by the amount of AI they used.

Some companies are effectively saying, “I told you so.”

“We never celebrated tokenmaxing,” Box CEO Aaron Levie told me. “We never had leaderboards, so we didn't get ahead of our skis on sort of incentivizing the wrong thing.”