In a recent interview, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said he can see a time in the future, perhaps just a year or two, when it will be necessary to put limits on Meta employees’ spending of AI tokens.

“I think you can imagine, at least in a year or two… that a strong engineer’s burn rate could be the same as his salary or his cost of employment. And in that world, he’ll probably need to put some limits in place,” the Meta executive said, while speaking on the Lenny Podcast.

Spending on AI tokens, a reference to the cost of processing AI prompts and responses, has been a much-discussed topic in recent days. Meta shut down an internal AI token spending leaderboard after AI costs put the company on track for billions of dollars in 2026.

Meta isn’t the only one rethinking its approach to AI experimentation. Uber also had an AI reckoning after it exhausted its 2026 AI coding budget in April. Rising token costs caused Microsoft to cancel Claude Code’s licenses, consolidating its engineers around its own Copilot CLI tool.

Mosseri’s belief, he explained, is that the costs of AI tokens will have to be managed like any other resource, offering an analogy to things like payroll or operating expenses (OpEx), which are the day-to-day costs of running a business.

“I think it’s like… any other resource,” Mosseri said. “I have to decide how to deploy capacity on my different machines because I have a limited amount of GPU, CPU, storage and RAM, etc. I have to decide how to implement OpEx to tag budgets on my machines. I have to decide how to implement payroll for headcount on my machines.”

Token budgets will be the same, he added, noting that the limit per engineer would have to be proportional to the company’s confidence in its ability to use the budget in a “positive ROI” way.

Meta currently has no token limits for any employees, Mosseri said, but he believes its usage could be healthy in the future. Going forward, he expects token costs to drop as AI model makers engage in a price war to entice people to use their tools instead of their competitors.

For now, the company has managed to control its token costs a bit by shutting down the “dumb things” it was doing, Mosseri noted, like that token spending leaderboard.

“It’s not that difficult to build a token incinerator and that doesn’t create much value,” he said.