JPMorgan rolls out Claude changes: $2,000 spending limits and extra security

JPMorgan has launched $2,000 monthly spending limits for some employees using Claude Code, internal messages seen by Business Insider show.

The cap, along with a new security effort for some Claude users, marks another evolution in how America's biggest bank is refining its AI use amid ballooning costs and risks, and reshaping expectations for software engineers.

Last month, two Teams messages in a group for some engineers with access to Anthropic's Claude asked about a new error code: "ExceededBudget" and "Budget=2000.0."

Responses from employees said that there is a monthly spending limit of $2,000 for certain engineers using Claude; two responses said that costs reset monthly. Other replies said that users can request to increase their spending limit.

As Business Insider previously reported, JPMorgan, which has a nearly $20 billion annual tech budget, has carefully tracked its engineers' AI usage for months, but this is the first indication of AI spending or token caps.

Token costs have become an increasingly pressing issue across Wall Street. In June, Zachery Anderson, chief data and analytics officer in payments at JPMorgan, said at a tech event that some employees are "spending more on tokens than their salary," but that there wasn't a firmwide effort to scale back usage, Semafor reported.

During the bank's second-quarter earnings call in July, Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Barnum said that while token expenses were at that point "trivial," the bank is "forecasting some meaningful acceleration in that number for the second half of the year."

JPMorgan declined to comment on the specifics of token limits or its cost strategy. A spokesperson said, "We're approaching AI with discipline, tying costs to measurable business value and consider a range of metrics, including adoption, outcomes, productivity improvements, quality, speed, capacity creation, risk reduction, and business impact."

The $2,000 limit for some coincides with a broader change in how some engineers at the bank use Claude, and was mentioned in a Teams group about a new coding architecture, "Devspace." Until recently, some developers piloted Claude directly on their desktops. Devspace, however, is a longer-term plan that restricts Claude's access to employees' credentials and its ability to interact with internal systems, the spokesperson said.

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This type of restriction is especially useful for running and controlling AI agents, which can make decisions and carry out tasks on their own.

Devspace is described as a "containerised," sandbox-like server hosted in Amazon Web Services in a blog post on an internal site for technical questions seen by Business Insider. A coding sandbox, like one on a playground, is an isolated place where software can run without affecting the rest of a computer system.