AI is saving time but bleeding budgets — who's pulling the plug?
enterprises like citi and adobe are throttling ai access as usage-based costs soar to $15m monthly, forcing a shift from powerful models to cheaper tiers.
companies are restricting employee access to powerful ai models after unexpected cost surges, with one firm seeing spending triple to $15 million monthly. citi disabled access to claude opus and gpt-5.5, while adobe ended unlimited claude access, pushing workflows toward cheaper mid-tier models to preserve credits. this backlash against usage-based billing suggests early enterprise ai adoption is hitting a profitability wall, requiring stricter governance and model selection to remain sustainable.