Claude Code at Microsoft: Why the Honeymoon Will Have Lasted Only Four Months

However, documents and internal communications mention that the cost of Anthropic's agent AI, Claude Code, is very high for the company.

Microsoft cancels most of its Claude Code licenses

In December 2025, Microsoft had started to provide access to Claude Code to several thousand of its developers. In January 2026, the American media outlet The Verge published an article titled: « Claude Code is suddenly everywhere at Microsoft ». Today, this same American media outlet reports that Microsoft has canceled most of its Claude Code licenses. A major strategic reversal has therefore occurred in just a few months.

Officially, Microsoft made this strategic change to prioritize its own agent tool, Copilot CLI, and thus avoid relying on its competitor's AI tool, Anthropic. However, internal notes mention another reason: Claude Code would cost a lot, a lot of money to Microsoft. To recall, Anthropic charges for Claude Code based on token usage. It is not a subscription model that would allow unlimited use of the agent AI: each line of code costs Microsoft money. For a company as large as Microsoft, the daily use of Claude Code can therefore result in particularly expensive bills. In reality, this observation can even be made at a small scale. Indeed, we had asked Perplexity Computer to create a full e-commerce site. It would have taken two hours for the AI to spend our 15 dollars of credits (without mentioning the monthly subscription at 20 dollars). Perplexity Computer had then only laid the foundations of our online site, after a sometimes laborious process… Returning to Microsoft, it seems that using Anthropic's AI agents costs as much, if not more than human work. 

Behind some speeches, a less sensational reality 

In recent months, we have often heard that agent AI is going to explode productivity and corporate profits, while reducing their operational costs. On the other hand, some tech giants announce the arrival of a disruption in the labor market, while adopting alarmist rhetoric about the development of uncontrollable artificial intelligences that could threaten humanity as a whole. But the reality behind these speeches is sometimes less sensational. Bryan Catanzaro, vice-president of applied deep learning at Nvidia, explained to the media Axios: « For my team, the cost of computation far exceeds that of employees ». Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber's technical director, told The Information that the company had used up its entire 2026 budget for AI programming tools in just four months.

In the same way, film production would now be accessible to everyone thanks to generative AI. Of course, it is possible to generate "Hollywood-style" scenes at a lower cost, but anyone who has already used an image generator like Nano Banana (Google) will question this claim, which has been repeatedly stated in recent months.

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Source : The Verge