Tesla caps engineer AI spend at $200; xAI is exempt
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- Tesla will cap employee AI spending at $200 per week starting July 6, requiring sign-off above the threshold, per an internal memo reported by The Information.
- The cap excludes beta versions of xAI products, effectively steering heavy users toward Musk's AI company rather than rivals like Anthropic's Claude.
- Before the cap, Tesla gamified AI adoption with internal leaderboards ranking engineers by token consumption, and software engineers were sometimes burning thousands of dollars in tokens weekly.
- Many Tesla engineers actually prefer Anthropic's Claude over Grok, according to four people familiar — despite Tesla's $2 billion xAI investment and Musk's own admission that xAI was "not built right."
- The reversal mirrors a broader corporate trend: Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget by April and capped employee AI spend at $1,500 per month, while Meta, Amazon, and Walmart have introduced similar caps or steered workers to cheaper models.
- Tesla also tightened AI security this spring, restricting access to non-approved models outside its internal "Bottle Rocket" platform and warning staff about feeding confidential data into external systems.
Why it matters: Tesla can't manage thousands in weekly token spend per engineer without slamming brakes, even as Musk claims AI will scale across Robotaxi and Optimus to justify a trillion-dollar valuation. The xAI carve-out also turns a cost-control measure into a subsidy for Musk's parallel AI operation, where Tesla engineers already prefer Claude.
