Walmart caps access to in-house AI tool after heavy employee use
Walmart put a token cap on its in-house AI assistant Code Puppy after heavy use, signaling the retailer is moving from open access to tighter control.
Walmart has started rationing access to Code Puppy, its in-house AI assistant, after employee demand pushed usage high enough to force limits. Workers who once had unlimited tokens now receive a fixed allotment, a shift that makes clear the company sees internal AI as useful enough to manage like a scarce workplace resource.
The change matters most for employees who lean on AI to draft code, troubleshoot tasks, or handle data-heavy work quickly. With a cap in place, those jobs can take longer if a user burns through tokens early in the day or has to reserve them for more complex requests. Walmart also said employees can use other tools, including Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and the message from the company is blunt: use the right AI for the right task.
The new limits come after Walmart spent the past year publicizing how deeply AI had already spread across its workforce. In June 2025, the company said its conversational AI had more than 900,000 weekly users and handled over 3 million queries a day. Walmart also said its AI-driven task-management tool cut shift-planning time from 90 minutes to 30, a concrete gain that explains why usage climbed so fast in the first place.
For store and corporate managers, the cap suggests Walmart is trying to separate routine, high-volume work from heavier, more expensive requests. That is especially relevant in a company built on scale, where even small changes in token use can add up across 1.5 million U.S. associates. Walmart has said its real-time translation tool works in 44 languages, another sign that the retailer wants AI embedded in daily operations rather than treated as a side experiment.
The move also points to a broader rulebook taking shape around AI use inside the company. Walmart said in 2024 that it was expanding its associate GenAI tool to 11 countries, and chief technology officer Hari Vasudev said in May 2025 that the company was developing purpose-built agentic AI tools tailored to retail-specific tasks using its own data and large language models. That framing suggests Walmart is not stepping back from AI. It is deciding where the line sits between useful assistance and uncontrolled consumption.
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