Apple engineers had $300 a day to spend on AI.

In October some of them dropped to $200.

Bloomberg says $100 is being considered next, and some non-engineering teams could go as low as $25.

This is the same company that spent this year pushing staff to use more AI.

Now it's per person, per day, and if you need more you ask an executive.

Here's what most people will miss:

The cut isn't the story.

The meter is.

What Bloomberg reported (anonymous sources, Nov 4):

→ Some engineers: $300 → $200 a day, cut in October → Some engineers: $100 a day under consideration → Many teams outside engineering: already at $100, some could get $25 → Some teams pointed to cheaper models or on-device AI → Staff said few people ever used the full $300, so the savings may be small

Read that last line again.

If almost nobody hit $300, cutting to $200 doesn't save much money.

What it does is make every employee look at the meter.

That's the real change. AI stops being a free tap and becomes a budget line with your name on it.

I've lived inside that meter for months.

I run a one-person company on AI agents. Every task has a price, and this week my top model ran out of credits in the middle of my morning runs. Nothing broke. It stopped, and the work waited for me.

That's what a cap feels like from the inside. You don't get a warning that you're doing too much. You get a wall at 7:35 a.m.

So here's how I'd run a team under a daily AI budget:

Rule 1: Put the expensive model on judgment, not reading. Bulk reads, searches and first drafts go to cheaper models. The top model writes the brief and signs off on what ships.

Rule 2: Track cost per finished task, not per seat. "$200 a day" means nothing. "$4 per merged fix" means something you can defend in a budget review.

Rule 3: Plan for the wall before you hit it. Decide today what happens when the budget runs out at 11 a.m.: which jobs wait, which drop to a cheaper model, and who gets told.

The companies that spent this year telling staff to "use AI more" are learning what every finance team already knew.

Usage without a unit cost is not a strategy. It's a bill.

Apple's numbers will leak into every other company's planning deck by January.

The question is whether your team finds its cost per task before finance picks a number for you.

Screenshot this for your next budget meeting.

One word: is a daily AI cap SMART or SHORTSIGHTED?