Meta and Microsoft pull back from Claude as Anthropic transforms from partner into competitor

Meta and Microsoft pull back from Claude as Anthropic transforms from partner into competitor

Meta and Microsoft, two of Anthropic's biggest enterprise customers, are sharply cutting internal use of Claude. At Microsoft, Claude spending had been projected at over $1 billion annually, according to The Information. But executives Scott Guthrie and Jay Parikh told employees to use in-house tools like GitHub Copilot and OpenAI's models instead. Spending was cut by more than a third, with the monthly per-employee budget in the cloud division dropping from $100,000 to about $10,000.

At Meta, Claude Code users fell from roughly 60,000 to 30,000, partly due to layoffs and partly because Meta is pushing its own tools like Muse Code and MetaCode. In one 28-day stretch, Meta spent over $105 million on Claude Code alone. Meta had already introduced AI cost-cutting measures in June.

Cost savings are one likely driver, but not the only one. Meta has little reason to keep feeding Anthropic when it wants to sell competing products and reportedly also wanted to restrict Anthropic's access to its training data. The irony of Meta worrying about someone else using its data is hard to miss. Anthropic has also grown extremely fast and is becoming a headache for incumbents. Even Microsoft has reason to worry, since tools like Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work are increasingly turning into Office alternatives.Ad

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