AUSTIN, July 5 -- If you are a software engineer at Tesla, the past several months have been unusual by most corporate standards. The company built internal dashboards that tracked how many AI tokens each engineer consumed and ranked them against their colleagues. Heavy usage was not just tolerated; it was cultivated. Spending on AI tools was the point.

That changes on Sunday.

Starting July 6, Tesla is capping what employees can spend on third-party AI tools at $200 per week, according to an internal memo reviewed by The Information and first reported by Electrek. Any spending above that threshold requires manager sign-off. The ceiling covers ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and every other AI service that Tesla's corporate...