Microsoft Restricts Claude Code Usage Amid Rising AI Infrastructure Costs

New Delhi-Microsoft has reportedly started reducing employee access to Anthropic’s Claude Code platform as the growing use of AI-powered coding tools pushes up enterprise computing expenses.

According to reports, the company had earlier rolled out access to Claude Code to thousands of employees, including software developers, designers and project managers, to promote experimentation with AI-assisted programming.

However, the widespread adoption of the tool is now believed to have sharply increased operational costs, prompting Microsoft to scale back usage and encourage engineers to shift towards GitHub Copilot CLI instead.

Despite the move, Microsoft’s larger partnership with Anthropic remains unchanged. The tech giant continues to support Anthropic through its multibillion-dollar Foundry agreement, which includes cloud infrastructure services and access to Claude AI models via Azure.

The decision reflects a broader challenge facing the technology industry as companies struggle to manage the soaring costs of deploying generative AI systems at scale.

Reports also indicated that ride-hailing company Uber exhausted its entire 2026 budget for AI coding tools within just four months because of heavy internal usage. Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga reportedly highlighted the financial strain caused by rapid adoption of such tools.

Much of the cost increase is linked to the token-based pricing model used by large language models, where businesses pay according to the amount of text processed and generated by AI systems.

Investment bank Goldman Sachs has estimated that the rise of agentic AI systems could lead to a massive surge in token usage by 2030 as companies increasingly deploy AI agents across operations.

Meanwhile, research firm Gartner projected that although the cost of running advanced AI models may gradually decline, overall enterprise AI spending is still likely to rise because newer AI agents consume far more tokens per task.

Earlier this month, major technology companies including Meta Platforms, Oracle and Cloudflare announced restructuring measures and job cuts as they accelerated investments in artificial intelligence.

With inputs from IANS