Meta shifts from "tokenmaxxing" to token managing as internal AI costs reportedly hit billions

Meta is allegedly running up billions in AI spending and now wants tighter oversight of how AI gets used, by whom, and to what end.

In an internal memo sent to about 6,000 employees, Meta flagged an "exponential increase" in AI usage and warned the company is on track for billions in costs from internal use alone by 2026, The Information reports. Individual employees and teams had no visibility into, or control over, their own consumption.

Starting in 2027, Meta plans to manage AI tokens more tightly with budgets, allocations, and dedicated tools. A team of developers and engineers built a central dashboard called "AI Gateway" that tracks usage and spending in one place.

Automatic alerts for unusual cost spikes are coming next. Meta also wants to steer employees away from third-party tools like Anthropic's Claude and toward its own coding assistant, MetaCode. Other models will still be available, though; Meta's own models aren't yet competitive at the frontier.

Token usage doesn't equal productivity

Engineers in Meta's new "Applied AI Engineering" division are working to improve MetaCode by creating coding tasks as training data. Earlier, Meta had made AI usage a "core expectation" in performance reviews, which led to so-called "tokenmaxxing": employees artificially inflated their consumption through an internal leaderboard called "Claudeonomics," racking up 73.7 trillion tokens in just over 30 days.

CTO Andrew Bosworth pushed back in a separate memo: "Nobody should be using AI tools just for the sake of using them. All motion is not progress and token usage alone is not a measure of impact of any kind." Tools should be used when they "genuinely allow us to do better work, faster."

Amazon ran into a similar tokenmaxxing problem that spiraled out of control. That both companies are now reining in AI spending fits a broader pattern: businesses are questioning whether AI is actually boosting productivity. Sam Altman recently called cost control a "huge issue" among his customers, likely driven in part by massive price hikes for model usage.