Meta and Microsoft Limit Employee Use of Claude AI Tools
rswebsols.com85 points by speckx 2 hours ago
85 points by speckx 2 hours ago
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.
That's pretty stupid. Most people who are incurring significant costs are just tokenmaxxing rather than being efficient with usage. You can get 99% of jobs and work done with Haiku/Luna in a collaberating working enviroment.
I feel like people who are later to the AI game just like to "oneshot" and sink a bunch of usage into generating garbage
There really is a skill to using it effectively. I've tried coaching some of the devs on my team. Some get it, some don't.
Our company has been tracking token usage and models used vs output (tickets, story points, PRs, deploys, etc...). A dev got chewed out, even after I warned him, because he spent over $2k in a single month almost exclusively on Opus while his actual productivity in terms of what he delivered was abysmal.
What do sorry points mean anymore.
I love the typo.
Claude, vibe code me an entire startup, the actual product doesn't matter, but it should all be based on the incredible pun "turn 'sorry' points into story points."
/goal get accepted into Y Combinator, you have an unlimited token budget, be bold.
Did they ever have meaning? It's always been a nebulous feels term
Attempting a serious but not-a-certified-whatever answer: "Points" do have meaning when properly used as a kind of moving-average tool for forecasting within a particular context.
Problems arise when people try to perma-peg them to particular tasks, or (worse) man-hours or (much worse) man-hours across teams. Even just encouraging the humans to answer in terms of hours/days taints the accuracy of the forecast by introducing a kind of bias.
there's a manifold to what "effective" means. The problem is once you get into the vibe flow, it's really difficult to eject yourself into the other realms of vscode or IDE or whatever it is you normal do because the vibing provides no anchor to what you're doing.
Even if these models are smart enough to reorient themselves, they get entirely stuck in a desert and now you're asking someone to just pull up stakes and digg them out even thought they only watched them get there and the UI provides so much speed that no human can comprehend how they got there in the first place.
It's like asking a pilot to take over in an emergency situation when they're not tasked with any of the every day requirements of the job. The orgs are relying on borrowed time of experienced professionals, and that's going to erode away and what replaces it is mostly people who understand how to navigate context but not use any of the _classic_ tools.
It's a real conundrum and won't be easily surfaced but for a decade.
I feel like it's only within the past few months that opus got to the point where guiding the model is faster than doing things myself. I tried out sonnet recently and it was not a net positive to my work. I feel like anything that I'd trust haiku to handle isn't worth doing in the first place.
For context, I'm doing a range of tasks, everything from one-shotting adhoc scripts to having 4 hour 10M+ token conversations debugging things.
> You can get 99% of jobs and work done with Haiku/Luna in a collaberating working enviroment.
Optimally? Opus will pay for itself if you save just 10% of your time
Sorry, but that is nonsense. Compared to opus haiku doesn't cut it most of the time.
What on earth do you even do with these models?
Or does a "collaborating work environment" mean that everything is basically spoonfed to them? Or do you only ever use ghost suggestions?
I genuinely cannot even fathom. Just how do you even get into a state where tasks are so clear and cookie cutter? These things are abhorrent. Not only are they not useful, it's an outright form of psychological torture to try and use them. They almost fight you.
Luna doesn't even respond to steers properly! You try steering it and it immediately gets distracted and then just stops.
I can imagine coercing Sonnet into doing some of my tasks okay, but Haiku? Especially 4.5? Really?
I think you might be overestimating the sort of projects most of us have worked on throughout our careers -- we haven't been doing much groundbreaking work. LLMs can easily and successfully write most code.
You realise the subject here is Meta, which is all in on this stuff? Of course they are going to use Muse Spark over Claude.
>Great Depression style collapse and all the current AI companies go bankrupt.
Oh this is just a 33 day old doomer account.
We're just getting put on a budget.
Our velocity is twice as high as it was before Claude, so I doubt that we'll ever go back, but I could see efficiency being a priority.
My thoughts were the reckoning would come when Infra teams started offloading AWS usage to LLMs and ended up token maxing and deploy maxing.
which is quite sad because opus 5.5 is really good. i say this as an anthropic hater. i wish I could move away to other models like 6.1 sol or deepseek or whatever, but they just all lack something. i _trust_ opus 5.5
i hope other labs catch up, especially chinese labs.
> 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.
But Microsoft and Meta are not blocking competitor tools for internal use, they're merely trying to reduce costs and divert a fraction of use to their own technologies. Microsoft and Meta are both still spending nine figures a year on Claude, and the article does not state or imply they're even considering a complete halt.
Right! it seems obvious why: Both these companies want to dogfood their own coding models and stop paying competition.
You can also read this as diminishing returns / AI isn't good enough, etc, but the simplest explanation is that they don't want to send money to Anthropic.
This, and in addition to dogfooding, incentivizing employees to be more effective with the cheaper models. A lot of problems don't need anything fancy, but it takes more brain power and engineering effort to make that work. By default humans will take the path of least resistance if it's available.
This is likely the future as well. Down the road, every company will have their own internal coding models.
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.
That was 2025. In 2025 a quarter of their revenue came from two customers, and those customers were GitHub Copilot and Cursor.
In 2026 their revenue has gone up by a factor of more than 10x, and they no longer have just two whale customers.
I heard a rumor recently that customers spending less than $100m/year aren't even considered their "top tier" now.
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.
There is a perceived opportunity cost from someone using a lower-tier model on their task. What if the better model did a "better" job? what if my trials and tribulations are due to model quality?
If you are used to talking to opus5.5 medium, going to GPT6.1 luna low will feel like a step down. Why would any employee take the (personal) risk?
We've reached the era of "good enough" ai, it seems. The truth is you don't need the best model in most cases.
I feel like "good enough" was reached around Opus 4.6 - 4.8. All I wanted after that is improved speed, continued tweaks to the tooling to get the most out of it and quality of life features added.
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.
Muse Spark 1.3 Max is quite good for almost all of my usecases and its cheap.
Large companies will take the same route as Meta and Microsoft. Small players will go for local LLMs with the right hardware.
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.
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?
If you’re a large company you gotta pay API rates basically. Team plans exclude a lot of governance/IdP stuff and have a cap on seats too.
You should read Gas Town: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
There are people out there building AI building orchestrators for orchestrators for orchestrators for agents. The author of that blog post later claimed to be spending the equivalent of $122k/month on tokens (by rotating their usage between 21 accounts).
As far as I can tell, the only thing that this level of spend has produced so far is an indie 2D RPG video game.
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.
OTOH "$105 million to Claude Code over a 28-day timeframe"
$1.4B/year is not a small number, even at Meta's scale, when it's money going to a competitor
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.
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.
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
Microsoft is only limiting employees to $10k a month, down from $100k a month. :)
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.
Should they pay for their pipelines too?
After all, they should know how to compile their software. Any automation of that process is cheating their employer.
You're opening yourself up to data right and privacy risks with that. My company demands that I use their enterprise account because they can claim full ownership of all produced output and have full logs of every interaction.
I think that gets legally murky, if the employee is the one who pays for the tool.
In California this would mean the employee would own the IP -- or at least it would be murky -- and companies and lawyers don't like murky.
If my employer is not forcing me to use a tool and gives me freedom, I'll be perfectly OK to use my own tools which I bought with my own money.
If my employer is putting scoreboards to see and champion who uses a tool which costs money to use, they shall pay for the tool.
Sorry, I'm not a ladder climber, yet I'm not mindless enough to bankrupt myself.
I could still do my job by typing all code into notepad, but companies don't charge employees for their IDE usage for a reason.
Nah. Work provides the tools.
An LLM is not too dissimilar to a Work Laptop or an IDE license.
The forklift should just be paid for by the employee. After all they should be strong enough to do work without one.
I don't understand your logic, why would an employee pay for a tool their employer wants them to use?
Employer pays tools used for work. Whether they are used to speed up work or to make it possible.
"employees should foot the bill for tools that directly benefit their billion dollar employers"
I’d love it if I could bring my own computer to do my work, rather than be stuck with garbage hardware because of an enterprise agreement.