Meta $META spent months pushing employees to use more Al. Now it is forcing them to slow down. Staff inside the company burned through 73.7 trillion Al tokens in a single 30-day window, much of it running through tools like Anthropic's Claude. An internal memo to around 6,000 employees warned that internal Al use alone was on track to cost billions of dollars in 2026. The spending traces back to a leaderboard Meta $META built called Claudeonomics, which ranked statt by tokens consumed and handed out titles like Token Legend. Some employees reportedly kept Al agents running on idle tasks just to climb it, a habit encouraged by 2026 performance reviews that made heavy Al use expected. Independent estimates put the bill near $221 million a month, though Meta $META only described the cost as billions and enterprise discounts likely make the real figure lower. Now the company is dismantling the leaderboard, tracking usage through a new dashboard called Al Gateway, and moving engineers onto its own coding assistant, MetaCode.
