New Delhi, May 25 (IANS): Microsoft has begun scaling back access to Anthropic’s Claude Code among its employees, redirecting engineers towards GitHub Copilot CLI as surging AI usage drives up enterprise computing costs, according to multiple reports. The company had earlier expanded Claude Code access across thousands of employees – including developers, project managers and designers – to encourage experimentation with AI-assisted coding tools, but the rapid adoption significantly increased operational expenses. Despite the rollback, Microsoft’s broader partnership with Anthropic remains intact, with the company continuing to maintain its multibillion-dollar Foundry agreement that includes cloud infrastructure support and access to Claude models through Azure services.
The development highlights a growing challenge facing technology companies as large-scale deployment of generative AI tools strains budgets. Uber’s Chief Technology Officer reportedly disclosed that the company exhausted its entire 2026 AI coding tools budget within the first four months of the year due to heavy employee usage. The cost burden stems largely from the token-based pricing structure of large language models, where companies are charged based on the volume of text processed and generated. Goldman Sachs has estimated that agentic AI systems could drive a massive increase in token usage by 2030, while research firm Gartner projected that enterprise AI spending could still rise even as model running costs decline, given that newer agentic systems require substantially higher token consumption per task.