Meta and Microsoft pull staff back from Claude, The Information reports
The Information reports Meta's Claude Code users have halved to about 30,000, while Microsoft is cutting planned Claude spending by over a third. Neither company had commented in the coverage seen.
Meta and Microsoft are working to reduce their employees' use of Anthropic's Claude, The Information reported on 5 October, citing sources. The original article is paywalled, so the figures below come from The Decoder's summary of it. The Decoder's account contains no statement from Meta, Microsoft or Anthropic, and the reporting rests on unnamed sources.
For Meta, the report says the number of employees using Claude Code has fallen to about 30,000 from roughly 60,000 earlier this year. It says Meta spent more than $105 million on Claude Code in a single 28-day period. The Decoder lists layoffs and the promotion of Meta's own tools, Muse Code and MetaCode, as the reasons given.
At Microsoft, the report says projected annual Claude spending was above $1 billion and is being cut by more than a third. It says the monthly per-employee budget in the cloud division dropped from $100,000 to about $10,000, and that executives Scott Guthrie and Jay Parikh pointed staff toward GitHub Copilot and OpenAI models.
The Decoder frames the shift as Anthropic moving from partner to competitor, noting Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work are increasingly seen as Office alternatives. It also says Meta restricts Claude's access to its own training data while it builds rival products. Without a response from the companies, the exact scale of the cutbacks remains the sources' account.