Microsoft and Meta Cut Claude Spending

Microsoft has cut its investment in Claude, the AI model from Anthropic, by more than a third. The monthly Claude budget per employee in Microsoft's cloud division fell from $100,000 to roughly $10,000. Developers were also asked to switch to GitHub Copilot and other OpenAI models. Meanwhile, the number of Claude Code users at Meta dropped from about 60,000 to 30,000. Claude Code is a code-generation tool built on Claude. Part of this is due to layoffs. But it also reflects Meta pushing its own tools, like Muse Code and MetaCode. Even so, Meta spent more than $105M on Claude Code in a single month, over just 28 days.

This looks like corporate politics and budget decisions, not a verdict on model quality. $105M is a useful benchmark if you are thinking about deploying coding agents at scale. That is roughly the spend you should expect from sustained use inside a large organization. Big tech companies seem to prefer building everything in-house rather than working with an outside vendor. That holds true no matter how good the outside vendor's product actually is.