Meta’s Mosseri: AI token budgets may be capped per engineer in 1-2 years

The article exposes a growing tension in large tech companies: unrestricted AI experimentation is burning cash at an alarming rate.

Meta shut down its internal AI token spend leaderboard after the company found itself on track for billions of dollars in costs by 2026.

Uber similarly blew through its entire 2026 AI coding budget by April, and Microsoft canceled Claude Code licenses to consolidate engineers around its own Copilot CLI.

The root problem is that a strong engineer’s AI token spend could soon rival their salary, making cost management an urgent operational issue rather than a distant hypothetical.