Tesla sets a $200 weekly limit on employees' use of AI tools.

It has been revealed that Tesla has instructed each employee to limit their weekly AI tool usage fee to $200 (approximately 32,200 yen).

Tesla Caps Employee AI Spend at $200 per Week After Adoption Push — The Information

This was reported by the news site The Information, citing information from an internal Tesla memo, and the restrictions will be implemented from July 6, 2026.

Because employee use of AI had been sporadic, Tesla had been working on a company-wide approach over the past six months, based on approved models and formal security policies. To encourage AI use, they even implemented a dashboard that ranks employees based on their token consumption.

However, perhaps due to the effectiveness of the promotion measures, users began spending thousands of dollars (hundreds of thousands of yen) per week on tokens, so a limit has been set. From now on, spending more than $200 per week will require approval.

The issue of AI usage costs is not limited to Tesla; Uber ran out of its 2026 AI budget in April, so it has set a limit of $1,500 (approximately 242,000 yen) per month for employee spending. Meta, Amazon, and Walmart are reportedly setting caps or promoting the use of cheaper models after the cost per prompt became visible.

In Tesla's case, the restrictions do not include 'beta versions of xAI products,' leading to speculation that Elon Musk is trying to lock heavy users into his own AI. However, it seems that Anthropic's Claude is popular in the field, while xAI's Grok is not being used much.