Companies across tech, entertainment, banking, and many other industries are throttling their employees’ use of AI and pleading with workers to use less powerful models to stop AI costs from spiraling out of control, according to leaked Slack chats, screenshots of internal dashboards, emails, and more material obtained by 404 Media from half a dozen companies including Atlassian, Adobe, and Amazon. In at least one case, AI spending has tripled to more than $15 million a month.

The news shows the looming fallout from companies adopting AI as quickly as possible, and AI providers’ moves to charge enterprises based on how much they use AI rather than a flat fee. Emails obtained by 404 Media even show some companies cutting off access to some AI models altogether in an attempt to stop burning through their AI tokens, and big tech companies like Adobe are ending unlimited access to Claude.

“A lot of people had ideas about how to adjust workflows with lower-reasoning models for certain tasks in order to mitigate token consumption,” an Adobe employee told 404 Media. “But I am not sure that they fully absorbed the news, and I'm not sure the full ramifications are going to be clear to everyone until it goes into effect.” 404 Media granted multiple employees at companies using AI anonymity because they weren’t permitted to speak to the press.

Citi, for example, has shut off access to Claude’s and ChatGPT’s latest models entirely, according to an internal Citi email obtained by 404 Media. That includes Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7, and GPT-5.5.