Meta and Microsoft take steps to reduce employee usage of Claude AI

If you were wondering the same thing I am - it's not about skills loss, quality, and less about money spent. It's more about frontier AI shops dogfooding their own models.

My company took away my Claude because it’s too expensive. I feel like there is a reckoning coming. The accountants are finally realising the cost of token maxing.

If true, it is a huge blow to Anthropic’s revenue stream. IIRC it was reported that the quarter of their revenue comes from just two clients and as the ex-Meta guy who left this July, I am convinced that Meta must be one of the two.

> monthly AI spending limits have reportedly been slashed from $100,000 per employee...

what. I can see a team of 20 costing 100k per month (but rare), but per person?

This is not surprising. Every big lab blocks competitor tools for internal use; it is a data governance thing, not a quality statement.

We've reached the era of "good enough" ai, it seems. The truth is you don't need the best model in most cases.

You have to use Windows, Teams and Copilot; how many people did I just lose?

AFAIK there is no such explicit, company-wide effort at meta. The article seems to try to slip Meta in there with whatever reporting they are doing on Microsoft, despite there being no such evidence for meta.

To also add an important context to the drop in Claude code users reported for meta - this elides that we are absolutely still using the Anthropic models full steam ahead, but are moving towards internal interfaces and harnesses.

So I would question if that 50% drop in CC users is more of an interface change than anything else.

I for one have stopped explicitly using codex or CC entirely. But the interfaces I am using still use those harnesses under the hood. I wonder how that is counted.

Limited to $10,000/employee/month lol. This is just to cut off a few people doing absurd things with low ROI. Don't read too much into it.

Muse Spark 1.3 Max is quite good for almost all of my usecases and its cheap.

Hypocrites? What is going on?

I assume that at shops that both employ engineers and are developing an AI product, internal usage is not about improving productivity, it is about improving the offering. Of course they want employees to use internal tools.

Maybe I am slow here and everyone is using Claude with credits at max use. But isn't Claude Teams like $25/month per developer for ordinary use? What the heck of these guys doing that makes it get that phenomenally expensive for their use cases? These are presumably well capable engineers who started to use this as an aid right not just throw Fable at everything and loop to the max?

Large companies will take the same route as Meta and Microsoft. Small players will go for local LLMs with the right hardware.

Why is it that it feels like I’ve read this story like 5 times now over the last year or so?

At Microsoft, the recommendation is to use cheaper models for tasks that don't need frontier models. I personally use Lua and it's more than capable for complex problems.

I should probably know more about Claude's TOS, but it is probably a mistake for these companies not to leverage the plausible deniability of their usage and turn it into a massive distillation resource for their own models.

That's a good start. Now they just need to limit use of CoPilot, OpenAI and MetaAI and they'll really be getting somewhere.

That's a shame. Microsoft's W11 quality disaster might have actually been improved with a frontier model.

Or maybe not, but the bar was set pretty low that going all-in on AI might have been worth it.

GLHF

... in favour of their own AI tooling.

I assume this is being pounced on by "I told you so" AI skeptics. Sorry but it's not what you were looking for.

This story is re-published from https://cybersecuritynews.com/meta-microsoft-claude-ai/ (it credits that source at the bottom) but with the internal links removed.

The cybersecuritynews.com news one simply republishes details of a story published by The Information. At least they have the decency to LINK to that Information story:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/meta-microsoft-work-...

... and of course the Information story is behind a paywall.

In other news, the CIA is limiting it's employees from submitting top secret information on KGB owned and operated websites.

Wait, what? We pretended this tech would save the world and it won’t? Oh man.

[dead]

So they're going to fall even further behind? Buying puts on Meta and Microsoft, or even better might give it to Fable to handle it for me

CEO's nephew showed him how good the Chinese models are?

I am only half joking, I heard something like "my son or nephew did this cool thing with $X so we'll take $this_radical_step because of it" enough times over my career.

It may bei cost efficient, but is it wise? We use not only the big US models, but also Chinese ones. This way we can compare who makes the difference. Simplified: Knowledge comes before economic aspects.

This may be seen as radical. But I think AI tools should be paid by the employee. After all, you should know how to do your work without AI.