Microsoft has reportedly started reducing employee access to Anthropic’s Claude Code and is encouraging its engineers to use GitHub Copilot CLI instead, as growing use of AI coding tools pushes enterprise computing costs higher.
According to multiple reports, Microsoft had earlier opened Claude Code access to thousands of employees, including developers, project managers, and designers. The move was meant to encourage wider experimentation with AI-assisted coding and improve productivity across teams. However, the rapid adoption of the tool is now said to have sharply increased operational expenses inside the company.
The reported rollback does not appear to affect Microsoft’s wider relationship with Anthropic. Microsoft still maintains its multibillion-dollar Foundry agreement with the AI company, which includes cloud infrastructure support and access to Claude models through Azure services.
The development highlights a growing challenge across the technology industry. As more companies deploy generative AI tools at scale, many are facing rising costs linked to heavy usage. AI tools often rely on token-based pricing, meaning companies pay based on the amount of text processed and generated by these systems.
Uber has also reportedly faced similar pressure. Its Chief Technology Officer, Praveen Neppalli Naga, was said to have noted that the company used up its entire 2026 budget for AI coding tools within the first four months of the year because of heavy employee demand.
Analysts expect this cost pressure to continue as businesses move toward more advanced AI agents. Goldman Sachs has estimated that agentic AI systems could cause a major increase in token usage by 2030, while Gartner has projected that even if model-running costs fall over time, overall enterprise AI spending may still rise because agentic systems require much higher token consumption for each task.
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