Rippling cuts token budget from 40% to 15%

Rippling says routing and usage controls cut projected AI-token spend from 40% to 10–15% of its R&D headcount budget, even as monthly use returned to roughly 600 billion tokens. The company’s AI Spend Console launch account says 10–15% of employees had generated about 60% of spend, including one engineer at $50,000 a month, before it linked vendor costs to pull requests, rework, roles, and teams. For operators, the result sharpens the case for replacing tokenmaxxing with measured allocation: meter outcomes by cohort, route routine work away from frontier defaults, and cap spend before broadening access.