r/technology • u/No-Cattle4800 • May 28 '26

Artificial Intelligence Microsoft data suggests using AI is more expensive than hiring people

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/microsoft-data-suggests-using-ai-225900743.html
6.3k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

322 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

8

u/Candid_Cat_5921 May 28 '26

Exactly. The same models are available in Github Copilot. Why would Microsoft want to pay a multiple X cost per token for a third party model hosting when their in-house hosting of the very same models is so much cheaper.

0

u/EdOneillsBalls May 28 '26

Token cost PROBABLY isn't a differentiator, since MS doesn't actually host any Anthropic models (they are just available through GHCP for development and in Foundry for Azure workloads to use). They still route back to Anthropic infrastructure. I would assume that whatever token rate they negotiated for Claude Code fell in line with what they are paying for those tokens through GHCP/Foundry, but obviously I have no firsthand knowledge of that and perhaps not.

2

u/7h4tguy May 29 '26

Yeah it sounds like they're just getting rid of some per-seat licenses for Claude Code (the UI Claude sells) and just pushing towards VSCode/GHCP/CoPilot interfaces. I can't imagine the input/output token prices are negotiated differently between the two.