A year ago, the smart move inside a big company was to use as much AI as humanly possible. Some firms even ranked employees on leaderboards by how many tokens they burned, a status game that earned its own name: tokenmaxxing.
That era is ending. The same companies are now capping AI use, and the new buzzword is its mirror image: tokenminimizing.
The latest is AT&T, which has started limiting some employees’ access to GitHub Copilot, according to The Information. Meta is reportedly reining in staff spending on Anthropic and other AI tools, a sharp reversal from the months when workers raced each other to consume the most.
The bill came due
The trigger is simple: the spending got frightening. The most AI-obsessed firms now spend $7,500 per employee per month, and agentic tools that call a model over and over have tripled enterprise AI bills even as per-token prices collapsed.
