Atlassian tightens tracking of staff AI use as other technology firms encourage ‘tokenmaxxing’

Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes. The firm has limited the amount employees can spend on AI in their work, but has reportedly never refused a request for more funds. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes. The firm has limited the amount employees can spend on AI in their work, but has reportedly never refused a request for more funds. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian Atlassian tightens tracking of staff AI use as other technology firms encourage ‘tokenmaxxing’ Some companies reportedly using leaderboards for employees who used the most AI in their work Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Software firm Atlassian has sought to tighten tracking of its staff’s AI spending by introducing “wallets” with monthly caps of up $2,000 for each employee, amid an explosion in costs at other tech companies. The move by Atlassian, which recently cited AI as part of the reason behind cutting 1,600 staff, bucks the trend of others in the tech sector who encouraged employees to use as much of the technology as possible, dubbed “tokenmaxxing”. Some companies have reportedly introduced leaderboards for employees who used the most AI in their work. Tokens refer to the measurement of a response AI gives to a prompt. OpenAI has said one token is about four characters, and something like the US Declaration of Independence amounts to 1,695 tokens. OpenAI’s flagship model, GPT-5.6 Sol, has a charge of US$5 for every 1m tokens, while Anthropic’s Claude Fable and Mythos models are US$10 for every 1m tokens. Uber reportedly blew through its AI budget in four months, and Amazon has reportedly told employees to stop using AI just for the sake of using AI. While Atlassian never encouraged tokenmaxxing or had unlimited AI budgets, the Australian company this month introduced an “AI wallet” for staff in the research and development team. According to an internal memo seen by Australia" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="329" data-entity-type="organization">Guardian Australia, employees have between $500 and $2,000 monthly spend in the wallet, which can be used across four AI products, including Claude Code. Employees receive notifications as they approach their limit on their wallets, and usage is paused when the money runs out. Employees can request additional funds. It’s understood Atlassian has not turned down any request for additional funds so far. A company spokesperson said it was transforming into an “AI-first company” by supporting people building and experimenting with the technology. “Atlassian provides a significant budget for our builders to leverage multiple AI tools,” the spokesperson said. “AI tooling budgets are set by role based on how different teams work.” They said the wallet also represented a boost in the amount employees could spend. A June PureProfile survey of 500 senior Australia staff at companies using AI, conducted on behalf of search AI company Elastic, found that 80% were concerned that high usage was being mistaken for productivity gains. It found 32% had reported pausing, cancelling or winding back AI deployments, due to cost. Elastic’s ANZ manager, Jeremy Pell, said a monthly cap on AI spend was “smart” and more organisations should be doing it. “Right now, only 9% of Australian organisations currently have any limits on token or API consumption when it comes to AI agents or autonomous workflows, so any organisation that adopts this practice is an outlier,” he said. Arun Chandrasekaran, a distinguished vice-president analyst at research firm Gartner, said wallets were a simple way to “incentivise the right behaviour” and stop people from using AI ineffectively. He said such expenses were becoming an important issue among businesses, with the cost explosion being driven by AI agents that autonomously undertake tasks on behalf of the user. “You suddenly have these systems that are all trying to do independent tasks that are spawning smaller agents, that are creating their own prompts and initiating requests for the model,” he said. “So while the AI model prices have been falling for the last three years, the volume of tokens that particularly the AI agents are starting to send to the models … is significantly increasing.” Chandrasekaran said companies are figuring out how to drive the cost down, including using less powerful models for simpler tasks, and looking at using open weight – where people can download and run the models on their own systems – or open source models. Explore more on these topics Atlassian Breaking News Australia AI (Artificial Intelligence) OpenAI Anthropic news Share Reuse this content