Even Tesla Is Now Rationing AI. The Great Token Reckoning Has Arrived.
Starting July 6, Tesla will cap employee AI spending at $200 per week, after software engineers were burning through thousands of dollars in tokens weekly. It follows near-identical caps at Uber, Meta, Amazon and Walmart — the industry-wide shift from “tokenmaxxing” to “token budgeting.” There’s a telling carve-out: Musk exempted his own xAI products, while Tesla’s engineers reportedly prefer Anthropic’s Claude. gafam.ai reads the great AI cost reckoning — and what it means for a Europe with no in-house model to fall back on.