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

Meta and Microsoft, two of Anthropic's largest enterprise customers, are sharply reducing internal use of Claude, according to The Decoder.

At Microsoft, Claude spending had been projected at over $1 billion annually, according to The Information. Executives Scott Guthrie and Jay Parikh told employees to use in-house tools such as GitHub Copilot and OpenAI's models instead. Spending was reduced by more than a third, and the monthly per-employee budget in the cloud division fell from $100,000 to about $10,000.

At Meta, Claude Code users dropped from roughly 60,000 to 30,000. The article attributes this partly to layoffs and partly to Meta promoting its own tools, including Muse Code and MetaCode. In a single 28-day period, Meta spent more than $105 million on Claude Code alone. Meta had already introduced AI cost-cutting measures in June.

The article says cost savings are one likely driver but not the only one. It states that Meta has little reason to support Anthropic as it aims to sell competing products, and that Meta reportedly also wanted to restrict Anthropic's access to its training data.

Anthropic has grown quickly and is becoming a challenge to incumbents, the article says, noting that even Microsoft has reason to worry as tools like Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work increasingly become Office alternatives. For Anthropic, reliance on a few major clients is described as a strategic risk.