Elon Musk has capped Tesla employees' weekly spending on artificial intelligence at $200 (£150), a step towards curbing the restrictions as companies seek to rein in runaway bills. Tesla employees have been told that their use of AI will be restricted starting Monday.
The cap does not apply to Musk’s own AI system, Grok, which has performed poorly against competitors such as Anthropic’s Claude, ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
Many large companies have previously pushed their employees to use artificial intelligence as much as possible in the hope of increasing productivity.
Musk said earlier this year that artificial intelligence would make the "output" of each Tesla employee "incredibly high."
But the push to use artificial intelligence has caused bills to skyrocket, as the cost of using these systems rises with demand. There are also concerns that employees are using AI wastefully to perform menial tasks in order to show that they are using it.
Many companies are now moving to restrict employee use. Uber, which has told employees to use artificial intelligence as much as possible, recently limited usage to $1,500 per month; Meta, Walmart and Coinbase have also said they will introduce caps.
Limiting spending can force employees to use AI only for important tasks, or encourage them to use cheaper AI systems.
The limits mark a shift away from “tokenmaxxing,” which previously measured employee performance by how many tokens were consumed.
A retrenchment in the use of artificial intelligence by businesses has heightened concerns about a potential stock market crash. The huge investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure by major laboratories has helped the market reach new highs, but these investments are predicated on the rapid popularization of technology.
Earlier this week, Musk responded to a message on the X platform predicting the imminent collapse of the technology industry: "Even when the economy is growing rapidly, there are always short-term declines. However, the productivity gains brought by artificial intelligence and robots are so huge that the overall macro trend is firmly upward."
Musk's own artificial intelligence company, xAI (owned by SpaceX), has struggled to keep up with rival chatbots, especially in the programming tasks where Claude and ChatGPT are widely used. The billionaire has said the system needs to be "fundamentally rebuilt".
SpaceX recently agreed to acquire artificial intelligence programming startup Cursor for $60 billion. The company has a self-developed artificial intelligence system called Composer, which Musk has encouraged Tesla employees to use.
Musk is determined to make Tesla a leader in artificial intelligence through autonomous driving technology and the company's Optimus robot. And as it pushes to exploit the technology, Tesla is facing increasing competition.
This week, Musk said Tesla has started producing Optimus robots at its Texas factory.
Tesla this week reported quarterly sales growth of 25%, benefiting from a rebound in the European market. Tesla struggled in Europe last year due to boycotts related to Musk's support for Donald Trump.