Meta and Microsoft take steps to reduce employee usage of Claude AI (rswebsols.com)

Microsoft?

Meanwhile https://www.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1wh0qxq/google_fi...

I wonder why they allow it at all.

Like its a no brainer to force your employees to use your own models, then RL train them to be better.

If it’s anything like AWS there’s hundreds of people making bespoke software factory setups, enhanced interfaces for ai tools, spinning up 10 parallel review agents with the best model available, etc because the budget is basically unlimited.

I think if you talk to LLMs and give feedback or openly say what works and what doesn't, you are essentially solving a captcha and produce accurate training data, while you pay for the token spend. I'd be a bit nervous with this lol.

Just one unsanitized input and you leak info. Or one hidden character and code may or may not belong to you anymore. Its very odd on many levels

Dogfooding their own model ls and not letting their competitors use their data to train their.

if AI never happened there's like zero chance I would've ever used or noticed the usage of the word "dogfooding" lmao i hate this timeline

which is quite sad because opus 5.5 is really good. i say this as an anthropic hater. i wish I could move away to other models like 6.1 sol or deepseek or whatever, but they just all lack something. i _trust_ opus 5.5

i hope other labs catch up, especially chinese labs.

That's pretty stupid. Most people who are incurring significant costs are just tokenmaxxing rather than being efficient with usage. You can get 99% of jobs and work done with Haiku/Luna in a collaberating working enviroment.

I feel like people who are later to the AI game just like to "oneshot" and sink a bunch of usage into generating garbage

You realise the subject here is Meta, which is all in on this stuff? Of course they are going to use Muse Spark over Claude.

>Great Depression style collapse and all the current AI companies go bankrupt.

Oh this is just a 33 day old doomer account.

My thoughts were the reckoning would come when Infra teams started offloading AWS usage to LLMs and ended up token maxing and deploy maxing.

We're just getting put on a budget.

Our velocity is twice as high as it was before Claude, so I doubt that we'll ever go back, but I could see efficiency being a priority.

$200 a month is too expensive yet they employ human developers?

I mean, we’re not far from a situation where instead of how many story points you completed per sprint the metric to optimize is going to be what was your efficiency? How many story points did you complete while minimizing your token usage. In fact, that’s a pretty good idea. I’m going try and implement it at work with some sort of complexity normalization function

The reckoning started years ago when we did the equivalent to token maxxing hiring coders for everything to crank LOC

Software is inherently a physics problem not all the job titles and specializations made up the last 20 years as dev job salaries kept attracting people

That was all illusory social construct to prop up jobs

Still a whole lot of that in tech but it's all at the top of the org now. Leadership sensory experience and thus innate habit to forecast future been programmed by years of yes men they refuse to accept the jig is up for them too

Sensory memory of being a useless figurehead fosters a lot of existential dread in priests, politicians, and the like. Completely aware their day to day effort is insufficient to sustain them they know how co-dependent they are. They'll dig in harder.

See Chris Matthews flame out shrieking about socialist execution squads. Dude seriously thought everyone wants to hang him from a lamp post. The reality is people just want a sense of control back and not have their perception dragged along by Chris Matthews.

The reckoning will be throwing out all external help, then reducing team sizes.

Do you know the details of the Claude Code plan you and your company are using (if not part of some enterprise deal)? Does your individual capacity out run something like Claude Max 20x ($200/mo)?

Good luck to the accountant that tries to tell leadership to slash AI usage.

I'm sure investors will love it.

Now we're starting to see real impact from AI, people are learning how to use it, and OpenAI cut prices by no less than 60% like a week ago.

You think now is the time they're going to cut the spend?

taking away sounds insane, we had basically unlimited tokens (inference bought from aws) and they moved us back to the $100 sub to save money

That's funny. In a meeting with my manager recently, they specifically called me out for not spending enough money on tokens. It's not like I didn't use it, just apparently not enough, and apparently on too low a setting.

Since then I've had fable cranked up to 11 for even the most trivial of tasks.

Considering that’s a healthy portion of a salary for an additional employee per person, the fact they’re slashing spending sure makes it look like AI wasn’t even a 2x multiplier at minimum.

It’s mostly from people using their personal accounts to run LLM services that serve a larger team or organization. At least at Microsoft, it’s still impressively hard to get access to an LLM for service usage with high enough rate limits to be useful, making running services on dev boxes much more appealing (despite the countless drawbacks that few people seem to care about around security, compliance, reliability, etc).

Meta was #1 by far

That was 2025. In 2025 a quarter of their revenue came from two customers, and those customers were GitHub Copilot and Cursor.

In 2026 their revenue has gone up by a factor of more than 10x, and they no longer have just two whale customers.

I heard a rumor recently that customers spending less than $100m/year aren't even considered their "top tier" now.

They're limiting it to $10,000 per employee per month.

There is a conspiracy theory that the tokenmaxxing period was anthropic/openai ipo play. They do the tokenmaxxing to revenuemaxxing first, then time the ipo window to show they had the the huge growth to justify their price tag.

However Elon was able to ipo before them which took a lot liquidity of the market. Their financials are exposed. The market condition and sentiment now is in the gutter. It would be very interesting to see how these would pan out

Right! it seems obvious why: Both these companies want to dogfood their own coding models and stop paying competition.

You can also read this as diminishing returns / AI isn't good enough, etc, but the simplest explanation is that they don't want to send money to Anthropic.

So nobody except AI labs is allowed to do "data governance"?

But Microsoft and Meta are not blocking competitor tools for internal use, they're merely trying to reduce costs and divert a fraction of use to their own technologies. Microsoft and Meta are both still spending nine figures a year on Claude, and the article does not state or imply they're even considering a complete halt.

Microsoft has full and unlimited access to OpenAI models. That was some agreement when they invested originally.

I feel like "good enough" was reached around Opus 4.6 - 4.8. All I wanted after that is improved speed, continued tweaks to the tooling to get the most out of it and quality of life features added.

Gamedevs are still around.

> Windows, Teams and Copilot

"Fine. Please no. I'm out..." in that order

Wouldn't mind if people at Microsoft actually dogfed themselves Windows. It's as if the designers and PMs all use a Mac and screw up everything.

Windows 11 shipped with a broken task bar, couldn't even ungroup items. No power users was ever involved in this.

Gets my work done... I know there are better tools but at the end of the day I get my paycheck

What does it even mean to use "Copilot" these days?

I use the Github Copilot app at work but it's really just a tool that gives models access to our Github repos and my local clones of them, and it's been super helpful to just tell it to reference other repos for patterns or integrations or whatever, get agents and an orchestrator to look at multiple repos to make a change across several projects and then implement them, etc.

And yeah you can use a selection of whatever model, I was using Opus 4.6 for a while, now I'm on GPT-6 Sol. It's been a very good experience.

Well, it's bad, but at least it's not Linux or MacOS, so there's some silver lining.

That's what you got from 200$ claude sub.

OTOH "$105 million to Claude Code over a 28-day timeframe"

$1.4B/year is not a small number, even at Meta's scale, when it's money going to a competitor

isn't it cheap till if you allow them to use your data?

Team plan has a seat limit.

You should read Gas Town: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

There are people out there building AI building orchestrators for orchestrators for orchestrators for agents. The author of that blog post later claimed to be spending the equivalent of $122k/month on tokens (by rotating their usage between 21 accounts).

As far as I can tell, the only thing that this level of spend has produced so far is an indie 2D RPG video game.

If you’re a large company you gotta pay API rates basically. Team plans exclude a lot of governance/IdP stuff and have a cap on seats too.

They almost certainly pay for tokens, which is absurdly expensive

It doesn't say they're cutting back on OpenAI usage.

To me this seems mostly related to the way Anthropic showed the level at which they monitor sessions, plus wanting to limit how much training data they're directly feeding into a company that competes with their own products/investments.

Microsoft is only limiting employees to $10k a month, down from $100k a month. :)

Microsoft is like $100bn deep into OpenAI.

Who's ahead, again? Do they have a moat, or just a nice field?