Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images; Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images
- Paramount Skydance is putting monthly limits on Claude token usage for tech employees.
- The change is meant to "ensure controlled spending and effective usage," a tech leader said.
- Other companies, including Disney and Microsoft, are encouraging responsible AI usage.
Paramount Skydance is putting limits on Claude spending for tech staffers as the company looks to cut down on wasteful AI usage.
David Ellison's company has capped how many Claude tokens users can use each month, three Paramount employees said. Tokens are units of AI usage and are generally how companies like Claude-maker Anthropic bill customers.
"As part of ongoing AI governance, monthly spend limits have been applied to Claude accounts to ensure controlled spending and effective usage across the organization," a senior AI leader said in an early-August message in Paramount's #claude-users Slack channel.
Paramount's move is part of a trend of companies putting limits on AI usage. Disney has told employees to avoid "tokenmaxxing," or maximizing AI usage without an eye toward productivity. Tech giant Microsoft also wants to crack down on AI token overuse, which CEO Satya Nadella said can be "addictive."
The senior Paramount AI leader said on Slack that "most users won't notice any change to their day-to-day experience" and added that tech leadership still "wanted to give everyone a heads-up."
A person familiar with the change said these monthly AI usage limits aren't team-specific and are instead "tailored by person and by need." They added that the limits are "more of an art than a science."
Users who exceed their monthly quota can request more tokens by filling out a form, four Paramount employees said.
Despite putting in Claude token limits, Paramount is "definitely still encouraging AI," the person familiar with the company's strategy said.
Token limits cause 'a fair amount of hubbub'
Some tech staffers were caught off guard by the new limits.
"There was a fair amount of hubbub around the change," one streaming employee said, though they added that it "won't really affect me" since they use only a fraction of their monthly token limit.
The senior AI leader's message thanked employees for "patience as we continue building out the right guardrails for responsible AI use at Paramount."
Paramount's cost-conscious move comes as its $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery is on hold after an antitrust lawsuit from 12 states.
Barring a settlement, the company will owe over $1 billion in fees to WBD shareholders while it waits for its March trial. Paramount's financial backers agreed to pay a so-called "ticking fee" of about $7 million per day that the WBD deal isn't closed, starting after September 30.
If Paramount buys WBD, it will have roughly $80 billion in debt, and if the deal doesn't close, it would have to pay a $7 billion termination fee.