Companies are throttling employee AI use because it's too expensive

404 Media, working from leaks across Amazon, Adobe, Atlassian, Citi and more, reports the un-hyped version of the current AI moment: companies are actively throttling their employees’ AI use because the costs are spiraling.

It’s a useful corrective to keep on file. The public narrative is frontier capability and “AI everywhere”; the internal reality, at some of the same companies selling that narrative, is metered seats, token budgets, and finance asking why the bill keeps climbing. The unit economics are biting inside the firms best positioned to absorb them.

I keep coming back to the gap between the two stories — the capability curve and the who-pays-for-it curve — because most confident predictions about how AI reshapes work quietly assume the second one away. This is a small, well-sourced reminder that someone is watching the meter.