Microsoft’s top AI boss has a message for engineers using GitHub Copilot: Your token spend is now being tracked

Microsoft has spent three years telling the world to use more AI. This week it told its own engineers to use it more carefully. In an internal email to his CoreAI organisation, executive vice president Jay Parikh wrote that “tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for” — and backed the line with policy. OpenAI’s cheaper GPT-5.6 is now the default model for internal use, every Microsoft division has an AI token budget target, and employees can pull up a dashboard showing exactly what their own AI habit costs the company.

The memo was first reported by 404 Media, which obtained it from a Microsoft employee who asked not to be named. The numbers inside are the eye-catching part.