A tenfold cut inside Microsoft’s cloud division
Microsoft has cut the monthly Claude budget for employees in its cloud division from $100,000 each to about $10,000, according to a report in The Information relayed on 5 October. Overall Microsoft spending on Anthropic’s models fell by more than a third. The company had been on course to spend over $1bn a year on Claude internally.
Two executives, Scott Guthrie and Jay Parikh, told staff to use in-house tools instead — GitHub Copilot, and OpenAI’s models, which Microsoft already pays for through its own partnership. Neither Microsoft nor Anthropic has commented publicly on the figures.
Meta halved the seats and still spent $105m in 28 days
At Meta the number of Claude Code users fell from roughly 60,000 to about 30,000. The report attributes part of that to the layoffs Meta has made this year and part to the company steering engineers onto its own tools, Muse Code and MetaCode. Meta introduced internal AI cost controls in June.
The scale of what is left is the striking number. In a single 28-day stretch, Meta spent more than $105m on Claude Code alone. Even halved, that is one customer paying Anthropic at an annualised rate well over a billion dollars for a single product.
Cost is the obvious driver, and it is not the only one. Meta sells AI products of its own and has reportedly sought to restrict Anthropic’s access to its training data. Microsoft has a different problem: tools built on Claude, including Anthropic’s Cowork, increasingly do the work people buy Office for.
The timing is the point
Anthropic is preparing to list. Its leaked prospectus, reported last week, shows an $8bn operating loss, $518bn of committed compute spending and a warning to investors that its own technology could pose existential risks. What a prospectus also has to disclose is customer concentration — how much of the revenue comes from how few buyers.
Two of the largest of those buyers deciding, in the same quarter, to move their engineers onto something else is the kind of fact that gets read closely in an IPO roadshow. It is also the predictable consequence of Anthropic’s own strategy: Claude Code and Cowork compete with the products Microsoft and Meta sell, and a supplier that becomes a rival does not stay a supplier at the same volume.
Anthropic could begin marketing its listing as soon as the week of 9 November. Whether these cuts show up in the revenue figures it files, and how the company accounts for them, is the thing to watch.
