“There was some news this week from Bloomberg that Apple is lowering its daily cap for engineers from $300 a day to $200 a day in how many AI tokens they can use. … Not only is this stuff not working for consumers, it's not worth the cost for businesses. And that's where all the money is. All of that revenue is business revenue. It's not regular people paying $20 a month. It's Apple paying $300 per day per engineer for people to muck around in Claude Code.”
The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026
Context
Anticipating the objection that AI lab revenue is climbing fast, Pierce argues that the revenue is mostly enterprise spending and that companies are starting to ration it. He treats Apple's reported token cap as an early sign of a business-side pullback.
Transcript
…earnings call was basically like, what we've seen is people come to DoorDash and then they come back to DoorDash. And the idea that, you know, everybody is going to find a new system through which to order DoorDash is just not at all present in the actual reality of being that service, right? Yes.
…and data center regulation, I remember being mad about AI, we're about to hit a real slowdown in how everyone thinks and talks about this that is probably good. And I don't mean like a like a pace the frontier or don't kill everyone slowdown. I mean a, hold on, we should try to make things good.
…want to, I want to bring in one more thing to this, which is there are going to be a lot of people who heard everything we just said and are like, sure, all of that is true, but the revenue numbers at these companies are going up really fast. Absolutely correct. Totally agree. Kudos to them for making $12 billion and losing 41. Honestly, good on them. Congratulations. What we're starting to see, there was some news this week from Bloomberg that Apple is lowering its daily cap for engineers from $300 a day to $200 a day in how many AI tokens they can use. And this is a thing we're starting to see. There was this brief period of token maxing. Do you remember this where everybody had leaderboards about who's using the most tokens? And everybody went, oh my God, look at all this. This is where all this money is going. And now they're starting to slow down. So what you're starting to see here, again, is inklings that not only is this stuff not…
Well, there is, there is money in it. It's just going in a circle.
Well, right. And it's all NVIDIA's. There's like, there is one individual trillion dollars, and I'm not sure it's real. And if it is, it definitely belongs to NVIDIA.
Yeah. Look, I don't think we are predicting a bubble crash here. I think we're, there's just going to be a like a rationalization of are these products good and are they making money? And particularly in consumer, the answer is no and no.
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