US-based technology giant Microsoft has started limiting access to Anthropic’s Claude Code for its employees and is steering engineers toward GitHub Copilot CLI due to escalating AI usage costs. Initially, Microsoft had extended access to Claude Code to thousands of employees to promote the use of AI-assisted coding tools. However, the rapid adoption led to a significant surge in operational expenses.
Despite the reduction in access, Microsoft’s broader partnership with Anthropic remains unaffected. The company upholds its multibillion-dollar Foundry agreement, which encompasses cloud infrastructure support and access to Claude models via Azure services. This move comes as various tech firms face challenges related to the high costs of deploying generative AI tools.
Uber’s Chief Technology Officer, Praveen Neppalli Naga, revealed that the company exceeded its entire 2026 budget for AI coding tools in just four months due to extensive employee usage. The increasing cost burden is attributed to the token-based pricing structure of large language models, where companies are billed based on the text volume processed and generated by AI systems.
Goldman Sachs predicts a substantial surge in token usage by 2030 as businesses implement agentic AI systems extensively. Research firm Gartner anticipates a decline in the cost of running advanced AI models over time, but enterprise spending on AI is expected to rise due to the higher token consumption required by newer agentic systems per task.
Several prominent technology companies, such as Meta Platforms, Oracle, and Cloudflare, recently announced layoffs and reorganization efforts to expedite their transition to artificial intelligence technologies.
