Meta and Microsoft scale back internal use of Claude

By VK

Published 6 Oct 2026, 11:28 UTC

Reporting from The Decoder

Meta and Microsoft are cutting staff use of Claude and Claude Code as Anthropic turns rival, The Information reports.

What it means for founders

Big customers are not stable revenue. Anthropic reportedly lost significant spend from two accounts whose Claude bills ran to many millions of dollars a month. If your startup sells AI tooling, a few enterprise logos can disappear the moment a buyer decides to build its own version. Track revenue concentration and price contracts with that risk in mind.
Your model vendor may become your competitor. Meta and Microsoft are reacting to Anthropic moving into their markets. Founders building on Claude, GPT or Gemini face the same dynamic at smaller scale: if your product sits close to a lab's roadmap, plan for the day it ships a rival feature.
Keep a second model ready. Routing work through an abstraction layer that can switch between providers costs some engineering time now, but it gives you leverage on price and a fallback if terms change.
Watch for discounting. If large buyers keep trimming usage, Anthropic may push harder on enterprise pricing and smaller accounts. Watch its next model and pricing announcements for signs of that shift.

The story

Two of Anthropic's largest enterprise customers, Meta and Microsoft, have sharply reduced how much their own staff use Claude and Claude Code, according to a report by The Information summarized by The Decoder on October 5. The pullback reflects a relationship in transition: the two giants increasingly see Anthropic as a rival rather than a supplier.

Microsoft trims its Claude budget

Microsoft had been on track to spend more than $1 billion a year on Claude, the report says. Microsoft executives Jay Parikh and Scott Guthrie then directed employees toward tools Microsoft builds or backs, naming GitHub Copilot along with models from OpenAI. Spending on Claude reportedly dropped by over a third.

Meta halves its Claude Code users

At Meta, the count of Claude Code users reportedly went from about 60,000 to around 30,000. Part of that decline came from layoffs; the rest from Meta steering engineers to internal coding tools such as Muse Code and MetaCode. The scale of what Meta was paying is striking: over one 28 day period it reportedly spent more than $105 million on Claude Code by itself. Meta had already begun limiting AI spending in June.

Why partners are turning into competitors

Lower bills are an obvious motive, but not the whole story. Meta wants to sell products that compete with Anthropic's, and it reportedly also wanted to keep its training data away from Anthropic. Microsoft faces its own pressure, The Decoder argues, as Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work start to look like substitutes for Office. When a vendor grows fast enough to threaten its biggest buyers, those buyers have every incentive to shift volume to tools they control. For context on how quickly Anthropic has grown, see Enki's coverage of the Anthropic prospectus.

What we don't know yet

Whether either company has formally changed its contracts with Anthropic, or is simply steering internal usage.
How the internal tools at Meta compare with Claude on real engineering work.
How much of the cut at Microsoft is about cost, and how much is strategic.
Whether Anthropic will respond with pricing changes for large accounts. Neither Anthropic, Meta nor Microsoft is quoted on the record in the summary.