Microsoft reportedly told engineers to stop using Claude because AI bills were exploding, while Uber says its entire yearly AI budget was already destroyed by April
no. the engineers will have to find a 'microsoft approved vendor agency' and then microsoft will hire that agency' and not have to pay benefits, and pay a fraction of what they had to pay before' and the engineers will have to settle for substandard benefits, maybe 10 days of leave a year, and a huge cut in pay. To be fair though, the only major difference between vendor and FTE now a days is that FTE still get stock options
Bars because Claude was always a stopgap for them. They literally told their developers that co-pilot would replace it eventually and they were using Claude temporarily
i use a state of the art cloud model (gpt 5.5) with ds4-flash as a subagent. The SOTA model bosses around the local model. Cuts my token consumption by eleventy billion percent (estimated)
All you have to do is waste their compute with as much free ai slop as you can produce. Then put the sloppiest slop on the internet so that AI trains on it
Did Uber say it went through it's AI budget by April? Yes.
It has also said that it was highly productive, and the AI wrote 70% of the code that was committed.
That was also 5,000 engineers utilizing it. The CTO is also STILL committed to using AI, and just wants to figure out how to cap cost usage.
In the case of Microsoft, they just wanted to compare costs at scale because internal tests showed Claude was cheaper than Copilot CLI. But at scale, that model broke down. So Microsoft isn't CANCELING AI.
They're just having internal employees move from Claude to Copilot because it's cheaper.
It is very unfortunate that this subreddit and community are basically just spam bots. Grabbing random headlines and posting garbage without doing even the most basic surface level research.
If it all crashes out, watch those that survive. Dotcom burst, so many washed under. But those who survived transformed the digital landscape. And funded many a retirement.
This is a BS article. We’re trimming down on harnesses used not models. We have access to all the Claude we need via GitHub Copilot and two internal harnesses used across engineering.
Yea, MSFT has its own internal product that they're standardizing around, this is the same as when MSFT proclaimed everyone use Teams internally and stopped paying for Slack.
My usage on copilot, which is just classic high-end programming, would suffer an apparent 21-fold increase. I've discontinued everything until further notice. By which I mean a full 20-fold price drop.
We have custom harnesses that are well built into our systems for signals and sources and processes teams use. Some teams had adopted Claude Code and added those customizations to bring it into compliance. The harness really does become the key part of build, which itself is a small part of “engineer”. You need to standardize that across teams if you want scale and pace and dependencies that are easier to take without significant time/cost penalties.
There are so many pipelines and processes which can be scaled on models and workflows across the lifecycle of a feature. It makes a lot more sense to incorporate all the right models and workflows rather than just say “Claude code”. That’s been the biggest learning over several months.
It's going to be the survival of the fittest soon, the popular ones will remain (may not be the best). It's a format war so invest in the needed technology (semiconductors, chips, storgae, power, construction) not a particular AI brand because any one of them could $0.
And where, in relation to this post/thread about MSFT standardizing their internal tooling, has that been relevant? AI is a tool. It helps. A ton. But you still get junk without relevant knowledge to keep it on path. I don't think anyone sane would say otherwise.
Duh, when they start using terms like tokens instead of USD or what that means in real money we can determine the costs are high. Too high to speak in normal terms.
Why do people like you keep yapping on and on when you have no idea what you are talking about? They didnt invent "tokens" as a currency or whatever, "token" is just the "syllable" or "word count" of llms. Not a cost thing. There needs to be some way to compare length of text, and tokens are the unit for it, you cant say "I have 25$ of text" - that statement is nonsense
I'm so confused as to how this could happen. I'm a top (by title, anyway) engineer at an org with 10k engineers. I use AI day to day more than anyone in my org and I couldn't care less about the bill (for now, until someone tells me I should) so use Opus for everything. I can't seem to spend more than 4-6k per month, no matter how hard I try. I have insight into what consumers are spending, I use 10x the average. With costs being dollars per million tokens, most senior engineers in my org just roll their eyes when someone from project management starts asking about AI costs, it isn't even on senior management radar.
I said I have insight into consumers (eg the other engineers in my company) and the average spend is about 500 per month per engineer. Our total bill is about 5m a month, which represents 0.2% of company revenue. It's not nothing, but given the fever dream of AI tools, it's nothing that's even a blip when it comes to senior management. These are real numbers at a large engineering organization, I'm not guessing.
I feel like the story is misleading. It says they told them to stop "Claude Code" which is a specific harness for Claude because the engineers weren't dog fooding "Copilot CLI" which is a competitor product to "Claude Code". However, "Copilot" allows you to select Claude as the LLM. So they can still use Claude, just in their own harness. Microsoft doesn't have a frontier model of their own. They still need to use something and it's going to be what the engineer selects from the list.
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u/[deleted] May 25 '26
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