Companies across tech, entertainment, banking, and many other industries are throttling their employees’ use of AI and pleading with workers to use less powerful models to stop AI costs from spiraling out of control, according to leaked Slack chats, screenshots of internal dashboards, emails, and more material obtained by 404 Media from half a dozen companies including Atlassian, Adobe, and Amazon. In at least one case, AI spending has tripled to more than $15 million a month.The news shows the looming fallout from companies adopting AI as quickly as possible, and AI providers’ moves to charge enterprises based on how much they use AI rather than a flat fee. Emails obtained by 404 Media even show some companies cutting off access to some AI models altogether in an attempt to stop burning through their AI tokens, and big tech companies like Adobe are ending unlimited access to Claude.“A lot of people had ideas about how to adjust workflows with lower-reasoning models for certain tasks in order to mitigate token consumption,” an Adobe employee told 404 Media. “But I am not sure that they fully absorbed the news, and I’m not sure the full ramifications are going to be clear to everyone until it goes into effect.” 404 Media granted multiple employees at companies using AI anonymity because they weren’t permitted to speak to the press.Citi, for example, has shut off access to Claude’s and ChatGPT’s latest models entirely, according to an internal Citi email obtained by 404 Media. That includes Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7, and GPT-5.5.💡Do you know anything else about token spend inside companies? We would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message Joseph securely on Signal at joseph.404 or Emanuel at emanuel.404“These models consume significantly more AI Credits per interaction and have been the primary driver of elevated enterprise consumption,” the email reads. The email says Citi disabled the models on June 24 and plans to re-enable them on July 1.Before shutting off access, Citi sent employees another email asking them to not use the more powerful models unless they absolutely had to.“⚠️ Action needed: Choose the right model for the task (reduce Opus 4.7),” one section of the email reads, referring to one of Claude’s more recent, and token hungry, models. Since AI tokens are now pooled across Citi, the email says, developers with heavier AI-assisted workflows draw more from the shared pools, while lighter users ideally contribute their unused portion, freeing it up for the developers who may need their tokens. “We need everyone to be intentional about model selection to ensure fair access for all users across the enterprise.”The email points again to Opus 4.7, saying, “Every interaction with Opus 4.7 (and other models in its class such as GPT 5.5) consumes significantly more credits than standard or mid-tier models.” It then provides a breakdown of what Citi employees should use each model for: GPT-5.3-Codex for quick questions, explanations, or simple code generation; the same model or Claude Sonnet 4.6 for code review and “standard chat;” then higher models like Claude Sonnet 4.6 for “architectural reasoning.”
Citi’s changes come directly in response to GitHub moving from a flat subscription model to a usage-based billing one in June, according to the email. The email says Citi is also monitoring daily Copilot usage to find “excessive or anomalous usage patterns early” and has budget controls in place. Citi told 404 Media it has not disabled models and the company is not taking steps to curb usage by allocating workers a certain number of AI tokens. This is despite the email and other screenshots clearly showing Citi blocking access to certain models.Atlassian, the company behind the popular software product development tool Jira, recently ended unlimited use of AI tools at the company and introduced a dashboard where employees can track how much their AI use costs the company. 404 Media has seen the dashboard, which shows Atlassian went from spending $5 million on things like AWS, Google Cloud, and OpenAI LLMs in the month of August 2025, to more than $15 million in May 2026. The company is on track to spend more than $120 million on AI tools for the fiscal year, the dashboard shows. Atlassian told 404 Media these numbers don’t accurately reflect its AI usage, but declined to say which of the figures were wrong and how.“I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that they changed their workflow to maximize AI usage, and now they can run out in 2-3 days, especially when using agents or similar or using the latest Claude model. Lots of angsty messages in Slack like ‘now how do I do my job,’” an Atlassian employee told us. “For what it’s worth I think it’s insane they were allowing huge amounts of spending on it before, it was only a matter of time before that had to end.” Inside GitHub things are a bit different. Employees don’t have a limit on token spend, but workers were recently told the company is looking into decreasing token spend by using open source models, a GitHub employee said. The employee told us that GitHub plans to test user-based billing, meaning budgeting AI tool use to individual people instead of teams, projects, or unlimited usage.At Adobe, unlimited Claude access is not being renewed and will expire on June 30, an Adobe employee said. Workers there were told instead, in essence, try to get everything you can done before that date.As 404 Media previously reported, Amazon recently shut down an internal company leaderboard which ranked employees based on how much they used AI tools at work. Multiple Amazon employees told us they suspect Amazon shut down the leaderboard because it was encouraging wasteful and expensive AI usage. After Amazon shut down the leaderboard, 404 Media saw a discussion on Amazon’s internal Slack where an employee shared a screenshot showing they had hit a token limit employees seemingly didn’t know existed previously. “Crazy, we go from no more leaderboard to actual usage limits in two weeks,” one Amazon employee said in a reply on Slack. An Amazon spokesperson told 404 Media in an email “We encourage employees to use and experiment with AI, and our guidance around AI usage hasn’t changed.”Other companies have burned through their AI tokens. An employee at an entertainment company told 404 Media, “We hit our limit for ChatGPT token use this month for the first time. One developer used almost half the entire company’s allocated pool with no obvious ROI (return on investment).” Last week 404 Media reported consulting giant Accenture found that much token usage, or ‘chewing,’ is not from supercharged engineers creating lots of code, but people converting PDFs into presentation slides. Accenture is seeing “soaring token spend” among its clients, according to leaked audio 404 Media obtained.There is an obvious irony—or cold calculation—in Accenture pointing this out. In the audio, senior Accenture staff explained they told their clients to adopt AI as quickly as possible. Now that AI costs have skyrocketed or become unpredictable, Accenture is positioning itself also as the solution to that problem, with one of the employees saying Accenture has a new opportunity regarding its clients: “to really think about token economics.”Accenture continues to use AI internally for trivial projects, though. Screenshots obtained by 404 Media show an internal tool that lets employees predict which team will win the World Cup. The tool was made with AI, a source with knowledge of the tool said.“They are still trying to ram AI down our throats at all levels and areas of work,” the source said. “Everyone seems to be trying to outdo each other in finding new ways to waste water and no one is telling us to slow down.”Adobe, GitHub, and Accenture did not respond to requests for comment.
About the author
Joseph is an award-winning investigative journalist focused on generating impact. His work has triggered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fines, shut down tech companies, and much more.
About the author
Emanuel Maiberg is interested in little known communities and processes that shape technology, troublemakers, and petty beefs. Email him at emanuel@404media.co
More from Emanuel Maiberg
Source link
Leave a Reply