Jensen Huang says engineers should burn $250,000 of AI a year, and Apple just cut its engineers' AI budget to about $50,000. And Apple plans to cut it again. Last month, some Apple engineers saw their daily AI spending cap drop from $300 to $200, Bloomberg reported. Some engineering teams could be cut to $100 a day next. Many groups outside engineering already sit at $100, and Apple has considered going as low as $25 for some of them. In March, Jensen said on the All-In podcast that he'd be deeply alarmed if a $500,000 engineer used less than $250,000 of AI tokens in a year. He also said Dario Amodei's forecast of hundreds of billions in AI revenue was too conservative. So Jensen's rule is simple: AI spending should run about half of what an engineer gets paid. By my math, at about 250 workdays a year, $200 a day comes to roughly $50,000. The planned $100 cap comes to roughly $25,000. By Jensen's rule, a $100 daily cap only makes sense for an engineer paid about $50,000 a year. And Apple still wants its people using MORE AI. It's steering teams toward cheaper models and AI that runs on the device, and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has said Apple's internal work runs heavily on Anthropic's models. I think Apple just showed where the real limit on the AI boom sits now: The finance department. And that's just ONE company: - Accenture capped Claude at $29 a month per employee on October 1, after some staff had been spending up to $1,000 a month, 404 Media reported. - Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in about 4 months, then capped AI coding tools at $1,500 a month per tool. - Microsoft has cut allowances too, and its AI chief Mustafa Suleyman told Bloomberg that Anthropic is extremely expensive and that Microsoft wants to eventually get rid of that cost. - Meta had internal leaderboards ranking staff by how many tokens they used, and now it has introduced token budgets. The usage is clearly there. Uber's engineers used the tools so much they spent a full year's budget in 4 months. So the people saying stop are the ones paying the bill. That's a huge problem for the AI labs, for one reason: Their spending is already locked in. Anthropic has committed to $895 billion, mostly for computing power. OpenAI has signed more than $1.4 trillion of compute deals. And paying for all of it depends on companies spending more on AI per worker every year. Apple, Accenture, Uber and Microsoft all pay for Anthropic's models, and Anthropic could start its IPO roadshow as early as next week. Its own filing shows revenue grew about 47% from the second quarter to the third, down from about 144% the quarter before, and price cuts took about $600 million out of revenue. Plenty of people will say this is just housekeeping, and they have numbers: Bloomberg says few Apple engineers ever used the full $300, so the savings may be small. Cheaper models can do the same work for less. Apple's R&D still rose 32% to $45.8 billion in fiscal 2026, partly because of AI. And more companies start using AI every month, so total spending can keep growing even with a cap on each worker. But Jensen's pitch depends on spending per worker going UP. Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Uber and Accenture are all writing rules that push it down. So the first question for Anthropic's roadshow should be simple: How much are its biggest customers spending per employee compared with a year ago, and how many of them have put caps in place? Who's right about what an engineer's AI is worth, Jensen Huang or Apple's finance team?