alt Hacker NewsNot an apt comparison. You are conflating the opex of the company with taxable benefits.
If what you said was how taxation worked, a hand tool manufactuting company giving hammers they make for $1 and retailing for $2 to workers building a shed on their property would be increasing the workers' income tax bill by $2. Of course, in reality the workers get no income tax bill on the hammer given to them for work and the company can get a $1 tax writeoff from the opex of making the hammer.
> increasing the workers' income tax bill.
They are not giving anything to employees for their personal use to use as they please, it is not part of their benefits whatsoever. It is work tooling, paid for by work. This is akin to Microsoft paying for Github or O365 for their staff. they can hardly put it in benefits, it has nothing to do with employee compensation or their taxable benefits.
OP is just using the benefits analogy as a comparison how IRS typically accounts for similar things when it is a benefit.
Employees staying at hotel for their personal vacation is a taxable benefit. Employees staying at a hotel as part of their job is a perk, and not considered a taxable benefit - A cruise ship can hardly say cost of cruise is now part of employee benefits (for tax it is not part of your comp) . They can of course market it as a "perk" to attract talent - same as the armed forces using cool extreme sport videos as an talent attraction tool. You can use in marketing yes, but it not part of your compensation.
Anthropic and other Frontier labs /Big Tech can definitely pitch token allowances as a selling point part of recruitment, but it cannot be counted as a taxable benefit - unless the employee can use it as they please outside work for any personal reason.