Meta and Microsoft Scale Back Claude Usage as Anthropic's Partner Turns Competitor

⚡ The gist in 5 seconds - Meta and Microsoft, two of Anthropic's largest corporate customers, are sharply scaling back their internal use of Claude - At Microsoft, Claude spending was planned at over $1 billion per year, but has been cut by more than a third - The cutbacks aren't just about saving money: Anthropic is increasingly seen as a competitor rather than a partner ### 🔍 What was found According to The Information, Meta and Microsoft — two of Anthropic's largest corporate customers — are significantly reducing their internal use of Claude. At Microsoft, Claude spending was originally planned at over $1 billion annually. Top executives Scott Guthrie and Jay Parikh ordered employees to use internal tools such as GitHub Copilot and OpenAI models instead. Spending has been cut by more than a third: the monthly per-employee budget in the cloud division fell from $100,000 to roughly $10,000. At Meta, the number of Claude Code users dropped from about 60,000 to 30,000 — partly due to layoffs, and partly because the company is promoting its own tools like Muse Code and MetaCode. The scale is telling: in a single 28-day period, Meta spent over $105 million on Claude Code. Meta introduced its AI spending reduction measures back in June. ### 💡 Why it matters Cost savings are likely just one of the drivers, but not the only one. Meta has no interest in continuing to "feed" Anthropic when it wants to sell competing products itself; moreover, Meta reportedly wanted to restrict Anthropic's access to its training data. The irony is that Meta itself is worried about others using its data. Anthropic is growing extremely fast and becoming a problem for incumbents: even Microsoft has reason for concern, as tools like Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work increasingly turn into alternatives to Office. ### 🧩 Context The partnership between Anthropic and major tech companies is gradually transforming into competition: Anthropic is now described not as an ally but as a rival. Against this backdrop, its two largest corporate customers are reducing their bets on Claude while developing their own AI tools — from GitHub Copilot and OpenAI models at Microsoft to Muse Code and MetaCode at Meta. How deeply the cutbacks will affect Anthropic's other customers remains unclear.

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