Walmart has introduced a token-rationing system for its in-house AI assistant after demand from employees outpaced expectations.

The retailer is now allocating a fixed number of "tokens" per employee for Code Puppy, an AI agent developed internally to assist with tasks including spreadsheet analysis and presentation creation, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The change ends a previous policy of unrestricted access.

Tokens represent units of computing consumption: the more an employee prompts the tool and receives responses, the greater the cost to the company.

A Walmart spokesman told Bloomberg that the company wants employees to apply AI in ways that create value, adding that it is providing the skills and guidance to help workers select the right tool for each task. Staff retain access to third-party AI platforms including Claude and ChatGPT alongside the capped Code Puppy service.

The token cap places Walmart among a cohort of large companies recalibrating their approach to AI spending.

Uber exhausted its entire planned 2026 AI coding budget within four months after engineers adopted agentic tools including Anthropic's Claude Code at a rate that far exceeded projections, Bloomberg reported separately. Uber has since introduced a monthly spending cap of $1,500 per employee per tool.

In a more drastic example of unfiltered spend on AI usage, one AI consultant recently revealed to Axios that an unnamed client had spent half a billion dollars in a single month on Anthropic's Claude after failing to set any usage limits on employee licences.

For investors, the shift from unlimited to metered access may clarify Walmart's AI cost trajectory. An uncapped rollout makes AI difficult to model as a line item. A token system effectively assigns an internal price per prompt, enabling managers to assess whether productivity gains justify ongoing compute expenditure. That question carries particular weight for a retailer whose AI ambitions span supply-chain automation, customer-facing applications such as its consumer assistant Sparky.

Walmart has been considered further ahead than most retail peers in implementing AI across its business, and the rationing move suggests that lead has come with costs that required active management rather than passive monitoring.

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