Top
Best
New

Posted by speckx 2 hours ago

Meta and Microsoft take steps to reduce employee usage of Claude AI(www.rswebsols.com)
170 points | 174 comments
ashleyn 2 hours ago|
If you were wondering the same thing I am - it's not about skills loss, quality, and less about money spent. It's more about frontier AI shops dogfooding their own models.
nateglims 1 hour ago||
If it’s anything like AWS there’s hundreds of people making bespoke software factory setups, enhanced interfaces for ai tools, spinning up 10 parallel review agents with the best model available, etc because the budget is basically unlimited.
UltraSane 15 minutes ago||
That sounds both very fun and very stressful.
wffurr 1 hour ago|||
Meanwhile https://www.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1wh0qxq/google_fi...
coef2 1 hour ago|||
This made me laugh https://www.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1wh0qxq/comment/p...
casta 8 minutes ago||||
Talking to my friends working there, they said they were surprised when that happened and they didn't find Claude quality to be that much better than Gemini when using agy. So maybe after all the issue is not mainly the model, but harness and custom tooling.
kelvinjps10 59 minutes ago||||
They give claude usage on antigravity and aren't them a investor on antrhopic?
nwhnwh 1 hour ago||||
What in the world is happening?
CamperBob2 49 minutes ago||
Ask Claude
nwhnwh 13 minutes ago||
We broke up, ask it yourself.
actionfromafar 14 minutes ago|||
Life uhhh... finds a way.
mawadev 59 minutes ago|||
I think if you talk to LLMs and give feedback or openly say what works and what doesn't, you are essentially solving a captcha and produce accurate training data, while you pay for the token spend. I'd be a bit nervous with this lol.

Just one unsanitized input and you leak info. Or one hidden character and code may or may not belong to you anymore. Its very odd on many levels

user43928 44 minutes ago||
Accurate training data?

At best you produce some noisy signals that are going to have a tiny impact if even that.

And that's on a personal plan where you didn't opt out of sharing usage data.

Business plans offer zero data retention. This is a non-issue.

plasticchris 18 minutes ago|||
These are companies famous for following the rules when it comes to handling other people’s data and IP after all, totally a non-issue and they would never violate contract law for a high quality training set.
user43928 6 minutes ago||
It would be a low quality training set that you theorize is a goldmine and worth illegally stealing from your customers.

I think this data is likely worthless compared to curated RL tasks.

tinza123 1 hour ago|||
Microsoft?
ihuman 1 hour ago||
Copilot
NewJazz 1 hour ago||
That's not a model.
ihuman 1 hour ago|||
True, but its not pure OpenAI GPT. If the point is dogfooding, then they'd use Copilot instead of using OpenAI's models directly
98codes 54 minutes ago||
They do.
therein 1 hour ago|||
If you ask Microsoft, it is a lifestyle.
glerk 58 minutes ago|||
Dogfooding their own model ls and not letting their competitors use their data to train their.
ActorNightly 1 hour ago|||
I wonder why they allow it at all.

Like its a no brainer to force your employees to use your own models, then RL train them to be better.

p1necone 10 minutes ago|||
Only if all you care about is developing models. I assume the rest of the business would rather just use whatever's best in class regardless of who made it, so I'm sure it's not that straightforward of a decision.
InsideOutSanta 43 minutes ago||||
Or let them use Claude, track everything, and use that data to train your own models.
user43928 36 minutes ago|||
If you assume that noisy general usage data enables good RL, particularly compared to curated RL training sets.

I am not convinced that's the case.

trueno 34 minutes ago||
if AI never happened there's like zero chance I would've ever used or noticed the usage of the word "dogfooding" lmao i hate this timeline
andybak 33 minutes ago||
That's odd. I've been aware of that word for decades.
Terr_ 29 minutes ago|||
Ditto, it's been around for a decade or three, especially if we include longer phrase "eating your own dogfood" and not just the verbification.
andybak 6 minutes ago||
I can't be sure but I vaguely recall it being associated with the big Microsoft antitrust court case? Along with the delightful phrase "knifing the baby"
MisterMunchkin 2 hours ago||
My company took away my Claude because it’s too expensive. I feel like there is a reckoning coming. The accountants are finally realising the cost of token maxing.
vablings 2 hours ago||
That's pretty stupid. Most people who are incurring significant costs are just tokenmaxxing rather than being efficient with usage. You can get 99% of jobs and work done with Haiku/Luna in a collaberating working enviroment.

I feel like people who are later to the AI game just like to "oneshot" and sink a bunch of usage into generating garbage

Tsarbomb 1 hour ago|||
There really is a skill to using it effectively. I've tried coaching some of the devs on my team. Some get it, some don't.

Our company has been tracking token usage and models used vs output (tickets, story points, PRs, deploys, etc...). A dev got chewed out, even after I warned him, because he spent over $2k in a single month almost exclusively on Opus while his actual productivity in terms of what he delivered was abysmal.

weinzierl 1 hour ago|||
I get it but it goes against the grain for me. Isn't it ironic that we have to waste our precious and expensive human brain cycles to think about how to use AI cheaply so that it is not more expensive than us?

In other words I want to spend 100% of my mental capacity in the problem domain for the things AI cannot do for me, like steering, grounding, verification and not for things AI could do.

remus 7 minutes ago|||
> In other words I want to spend 100% of my mental capacity in the problem domain for the things AI cannot do for me, like steering, grounding, verification and not for things AI could do.

It sounds like the parent is less talking about this, and more people burning tokens while not getting useful work done.

ForHackernews 50 minutes ago|||
I dunno, using tools and resources effectively is arguably the essence of good engineering.
proxyscore 1 hour ago||||
So you are going to blame this one that dev?

Define productivity, and while at it, quality, maintainability , modularity and so forth.

n4r9 1 hour ago||||
What do sorry points mean anymore.
senko 1 hour ago|||
I love the typo.
btown 1 hour ago||
Claude, vibe code me an entire startup, the actual product doesn't matter, but it should all be based on the incredible pun "turn 'sorry' points into story points."

/goal get accepted into Y Combinator, you have an unlimited token budget, be bold.

EDIT: no, do not just make a product that gives away your unlimited token budget to users for free!

SOLAR_FIELDS 1 hour ago||||
Did they ever have meaning? It's always been a nebulous feels term
Terr_ 1 hour ago||
Attempting a serious but not-a-certified-whatever answer: "Points" do have meaning when properly used as a kind of moving-average tool for forecasting within a particular context.

Problems arise when people try to perma-peg them to particular tasks, or (worse) man-hours or (much worse) man-hours across teams. Even just encouraging the humans to answer in terms of hours/days taints the accuracy of the forecast by introducing a kind of bias.

fdsajfkldsfklds 1 hour ago||
For forecasting what, if not man-hours?
t-writescode 48 minutes ago||
Effort. Which is a very nebulous term, I agree.

So, what you do is you recognize every ticket has a somewhat variable “actual effort”; and, if you’ve been honest in approximate effort pointing, you’ll know your team (or your own) velocity.

From there you can run Monte Carlo simulations - say a few hundred thousand, and get a pretty good estimate of actual time spent.

I’ve seen it work before with shocking accuracy.

Terr_ 12 minutes ago||
To play with the math analogies, imagine a black-box function:

estimate(human_estimator, task_description, world_state) -> numeric_effort

Assume that for various practical reasons, we've decided it's one of the best functions out there. How do we use it effectively, especially when it has noise, and drifts over time with unseen changes to the human_estimator and the hideously complex world_state?

One option is to run it multiple times with different person/task combinations putting a number on to each task. Then the tasks you recently completed in a sampling period ("sprint") become a quantifiable number ("velocity").

Do the same process to upcoming tasks, and you can figure out which ones are likely to fit if the velocity doesn't change. (If you know it will change due to losing staff or vacation days, apply a multiplier and hope for the best.)

PunchyHamster 22 minutes ago||||
It's funny, the thing that makes effective prompt also makes effective documentation/communication.

It's bizzare to see people that made clown issues (not enough detail etc.) suddenly start writing detailed prompts just because it is AI that will do the task and not the human on the other side.

cyanydeez 1 hour ago|||
there's a manifold to what "effective" means. The problem is once you get into the vibe flow, it's really difficult to eject yourself into the other realms of vscode or IDE or whatever it is you normal do because the vibing provides no anchor to what you're doing.

Even if these models are smart enough to reorient themselves, they get entirely stuck in a desert and now you're asking someone to just pull up stakes and digg them out even thought they only watched them get there and the UI provides so much speed that no human can comprehend how they got there in the first place.

It's like asking a pilot to take over in an emergency situation when they're not tasked with any of the every day requirements of the job. The orgs are relying on borrowed time of experienced professionals, and that's going to erode away and what replaces it is mostly people who understand how to navigate context but not use any of the _classic_ tools.

It's a real conundrum and won't be easily surfaced but for a decade.

mainmailman 51 minutes ago||
I’m trying really hard to keep my skills up but it doesn’t feel productive when I’m using it to write code. It feels like I’m slowing down the AI to the point that it’s not as effective as just letting it go. But I don’t get all the learning that comes from that time along the way.

Have you found ways to stay sharp while using it? Or are you relying on other projects outside of work to keep your skills fresh?

cogman10 38 minutes ago||||
That's what happens when token usage becomes a performance metric. As has been done at my company.
hatthew 1 hour ago||||
I feel like it's only within the past few months that opus got to the point where guiding the model is faster than doing things myself. I tried out sonnet recently and it was not a net positive to my work. I feel like anything that I'd trust haiku to handle isn't worth doing in the first place.

For context, I'm doing a range of tasks, everything from one-shotting adhoc scripts to having 4 hour 10M+ token conversations debugging things.

usaar333 1 hour ago||||
> You can get 99% of jobs and work done with Haiku/Luna in a collaberating working enviroment.

Optimally? Opus will pay for itself if you save just 10% of your time

geodel 1 hour ago||
True. I always Opus to pay for itself if it wants to get used by me.
AIblemblio 46 minutes ago||
the poster did mention "if it saves 10% of your time".

So be less snarky?

funnym0nk3y 1 hour ago||||
Sorry, but that is nonsense. Compared to opus haiku doesn't cut it most of the time.
perching_aix 1 hour ago|||
What on earth do you even do with these models?

Or does a "collaborating work environment" mean that everything is basically spoonfed to them? Or do you only ever use ghost suggestions?

I genuinely cannot even fathom. Just how do you even get into a state where tasks are so clear and cookie cutter? These things are abhorrent. Not only are they not useful, it's an outright form of psychological torture to try and use them. They almost fight you.

Luna doesn't even respond to steers properly! You try steering it and it immediately gets distracted and then just stops.

I can imagine coercing Sonnet into doing some of my tasks okay, but Haiku? Especially 4.5? Really?

dpkirchner 1 hour ago||
I think you might be overestimating the sort of projects most of us have worked on throughout our careers -- we haven't been doing much groundbreaking work. LLMs can easily and successfully write most code.
perching_aix 1 hour ago||
It's possible it's my role distorting my perception, cause technically I don't write software, I work an SRE role. None of my items come pre-chewed or paced, it's all good luck and god bless.

I'm desperately trying to classify and standardize my work items and delegate them to less capable models, because my usage is clearly unsustainable and this same sentiment as above keeps being pushed on me too. But all my tasks are genuinely fairly arbitrary, so there's no real way around the agent actually being able to reason about business and technical context proper. It's not even that they're hard, it's just that they're dynamic.

I can get Luna to do things like walk our observability stack and perform a healthcheck, then defer to a stronger model if anything looks super off, but if I'm being entirely honest, this could basically be just a script. Which Opus 5.5 will immediately write for itself if it doesn't yet exist, run that, and then off it goes depending. But Luna will never actually do an investigation proper. Heck, it can't even read our dashboards most of the time, tripping up on Grafana minutia.

It feels like that surgeon vs surgeon comparison, where you're made to decide based on their surgery success rate, and the better succeeding surgeon simply reward hacks the number by only operating on less dicey cases. Except there's no objective way to make this classification here, so jackasses like the above get to play with my insecurities with full obnoxious confidence, while I'm left desperately trying to slim my usage and failing to do so between two moments of crippling self doubt and blockers.

AIblemblio 44 minutes ago||
Our ai basic analysis for SRE / k8s based platform is haiku and its surprisngly good.

I wouldn't even tried it, i would still just go with even Opus (we don't have that many alerts) but it really surpsied me.

When i ran into usage limits a few days ago i switched most to Sonnet and again was surprised how good it is now.

perching_aix 27 minutes ago||
I wish we had such a platform (and was properly adopted). Maybe then the necessary context would be properly organized, and these lesser models could be effective here as well, especially if combined with harnessing integrations too. I still have a hard time accepting that Haiku/Luna tier models can be effective there even then, but I'll just have to take your word for it I suppose.
password54321 1 hour ago|||
You realise the subject here is Meta, which is all in on this stuff? Of course they are going to use Muse Spark over Claude.

>Great Depression style collapse and all the current AI companies go bankrupt.

Oh this is just a 33 day old doomer account.

righthand 1 hour ago||
And yours is a 4 year old hype account?
password54321 1 hour ago||
Nah, I just respond to a few things here and there.
tty456 33 minutes ago|||
Do you know the details of the Claude Code plan you and your company are using (if not part of some enterprise deal)? Does your individual capacity out run something like Claude Max 20x ($200/mo)?
woah 1 hour ago|||
$200 a month is too expensive yet they employ human developers?
cpncrunch 1 hour ago|||
It's unclear how much OP's company was spending. The article gives a figure of $100k/month per employee.

But even $200/month is worth shaving if it doesn't generate value.

chrisweekly 38 minutes ago||
$100k/month per employee?

um.

platinumrad 1 hour ago||||
Corporations pay API rates.
proxyscore 1 hour ago|||
So what, if they're cutting it, it has propagated to the last bean counter that the roi isn't there.

This takes some doing and now is the time where it's dawning on the finance departments.

CamperBob2 24 minutes ago||||
And someday I hope to understand why they do that. CEO: "Let's see, I can pay $200/month for Bob's tokens, or I can pay $2000/month or so, and then hope he doesn't screw up and and rack up a seven-figure bill. The service is the same either way. Hmm."
IshKebab 42 minutes ago|||
I use Opus 5.5 heavily but only spend around $800/week at API rates. I mean, I say "only"... That's a lot in absolute terms, but trivial compared to my salary and EASY worth it.
AIblemblio 42 minutes ago|||
Besides that the article states quite high numbers, budget is budget in these companies.

You had budget for your normal salaries, for externals and now suddenly you have a few millions additional.

What do you do? You compensate.

Business people doing business things.

user43928 22 minutes ago|||
Good luck to the accountant that tries to tell leadership to slash AI usage.

I'm sure investors will love it.

Now we're starting to see real impact from AI, people are learning how to use it, and OpenAI cut prices by no less than 60% like a week ago.

You think now is the time they're going to cut the spend?

yeahBoiii 51 minutes ago|||
The reckoning started years ago when we did the equivalent to token maxxing hiring coders for everything to crank LOC

Software is inherently a physics problem not all the job titles and specializations made up the last 20 years as dev job salaries kept attracting people

That was all illusory social construct to prop up jobs

Still a whole lot of that in tech but it's all at the top of the org now. Leadership sensory experience and thus innate habit to forecast future been programmed by years of yes men they refuse to accept the jig is up for them too

Sensory memory of being a useless figurehead fosters a lot of existential dread in priests, politicians, and the like. Completely aware their day to day effort is insufficient to sustain them they know how co-dependent they are. They'll dig in harder.

See Chris Matthews flame out shrieking about socialist execution squads. Dude seriously thought everyone wants to hang him from a lamp post. The reality is people just want a sense of control back and not have their perception dragged along by Chris Matthews.

AIblemblio 48 minutes ago|||
The reckoning will be throwing out all external help, then reducing team sizes.
lenerdenator 1 hour ago|||
We're just getting put on a budget.

Our velocity is twice as high as it was before Claude, so I doubt that we'll ever go back, but I could see efficiency being a priority.

righthand 1 hour ago|||
My thoughts were the reckoning would come when Infra teams started offloading AWS usage to LLMs and ended up token maxing and deploy maxing.
dyauspitr 1 hour ago|||
I mean, we’re not far from a situation where instead of how many story points you completed per sprint the metric to optimize is going to be what was your efficiency? How many story points did you complete while minimizing your token usage. In fact, that’s a pretty good idea. I’m going try and implement it at work with some sort of complexity normalization function
sergiotapia 2 hours ago||
which is quite sad because opus 5.5 is really good. i say this as an anthropic hater. i wish I could move away to other models like 6.1 sol or deepseek or whatever, but they just all lack something. i _trust_ opus 5.5

i hope other labs catch up, especially chinese labs.

dude250711 1 hour ago||
Not sure it's even possible to catch up by distilling.
shard972 1 minute ago||
Why is it that it feels like I’ve read this story like 5 times now over the last year or so?
Danox 2 minutes ago||
Hypocrites? What is going on?
throwitaway222 1 hour ago||
> monthly AI spending limits have reportedly been slashed from $100,000 per employee...

what. I can see a team of 20 costing 100k per month (but rare), but per person?

nkrisc 1 hour ago||
Considering that’s a healthy portion of a salary for an additional employee per person, the fact they’re slashing spending sure makes it look like AI wasn’t even a 2x multiplier at minimum.
legulere 33 minutes ago|||
You could only conclude that if they would have dropped LLMs completely. It just means they see the benefit/cost optimum at a lower point than 100k/programmer.

I also doubt a longterm 2x multiplier for most developers.

flatline 54 minutes ago||||
We're sitting on a year of more or less capable coding models and I have not exactly seen a revolution in new software being released. AI is likely a force multiplier for specific subsets of individuals and workflows. Coding is not a bottleneck for a lot of systems.

I suspect that SaaS is silently being eaten alive as an industry.

legulere 26 minutes ago|||
You often pay for regulatory compliance and liability with SaaS. Would you risk running your own vibe-coded payroll or accounting system for your company?
holoduke 18 minutes ago|||
Talk to the emulator community. Huge leaps being made there. Or binary decompiling topics. Huge leaps there. There is more than web applications
grebc 1 hour ago||||
Very likely a negative multiplier.
IshKebab 41 minutes ago|||
That's monthly, not yearly.
oldmanhorton 1 hour ago||
It’s mostly from people using their personal accounts to run LLM services that serve a larger team or organization. At least at Microsoft, it’s still impressively hard to get access to an LLM for service usage with high enough rate limits to be useful, making running services on dev boxes much more appealing (despite the countless drawbacks that few people seem to care about around security, compliance, reliability, etc).
vld_chk 1 hour ago||
If true, it is a huge blow to Anthropic’s revenue stream. IIRC it was reported that the quarter of their revenue comes from just two clients and as the ex-Meta guy who left this July, I am convinced that Meta must be one of the two.
simonw 1 hour ago||
That was 2025. In 2025 a quarter of their revenue came from two customers, and those customers were GitHub Copilot and Cursor.

In 2026 their revenue has gone up by a factor of more than 10x, and they no longer have just two whale customers.

I heard a rumor recently that customers spending less than $100m/year aren't even considered their "top tier" now.

shakna 55 minutes ago||
We know the 2025 revenue numbers from Anthropic's leaked prospectus.

Where are you getting the 2026 figures from? The Bloomberg article that was "on track to generate" and just prediction?

simonw 43 minutes ago||
The 2026 figures have been coming out all year. I collected some of them here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/29/anthropic/ and https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/23/anthropics-best-ai-mod...

The most recent reporting from Reuters themselves (somehow not included in their more recent article about the IPO stuff): https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-ipo-valuation-hin...

> The company's financial trajectory already shows how quickly that equation is changing. Anthropic's revenue run rate was about $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to the company, before rising to more than $47 billion by May. Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.

Here's the FT: https://www.ft.com/content/4564e6a5-69e9-40a6-bf0f-a888f2f4f... - "Anthropic tells investors it will be profitable for second straight quarter"

> The company has told a small group of shareholders that its adjusted operating income will be positive for the second consecutive quarter, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter.

These are leaked and self-reported numbers, but no matter how much skepticism you pile on them it still looks likely that Anthropic in 2026 have had some of the fastest revenue growth of any company in history.

JacobAsmuth 35 minutes ago|||
They're limiting it to $10,000 per employee per month.
binlog 1 hour ago|||
Meta was #1 by far
watwut 1 hour ago|||
Well that explains the limitation.
gloryjulio 10 minutes ago||
There is a conspiracy theory that the tokenmaxxing period was anthropic/openai ipo play. They do the tokenmaxxing to revenuemaxxing first, then time the ipo window to show they had the the huge growth to justify their price tag.

However Elon was able to ipo before them which took a lot liquidity of the market. Their financials are exposed. The market condition and sentiment now is in the gutter. It would be very interesting to see how these would pan out

Benard-dev 2 hours ago||
This is not surprising. Every big lab blocks competitor tools for internal use; it is a data governance thing, not a quality statement.
jvanderbot 2 hours ago||
Right! it seems obvious why: Both these companies want to dogfood their own coding models and stop paying competition.

You can also read this as diminishing returns / AI isn't good enough, etc, but the simplest explanation is that they don't want to send money to Anthropic.

fasterik 2 hours ago|||
This, and in addition to dogfooding, incentivizing employees to be more effective with the cheaper models. A lot of problems don't need anything fancy, but it takes more brain power and engineering effort to make that work. By default humans will take the path of least resistance if it's available.
mattm 1 hour ago||||
This is likely the future as well. Down the road, every company will have their own internal coding models.
NewJazz 1 hour ago|||
Does MS have coding models?
WaltPurvis 1 hour ago|||
But Microsoft and Meta are not blocking competitor tools for internal use, they're merely trying to reduce costs and divert a fraction of use to their own technologies. Microsoft and Meta are both still spending nine figures a year on Claude, and the article does not state or imply they're even considering a complete halt.
AIblemblio 36 minutes ago|||
Microsoft has full and unlimited access to OpenAI models. That was some agreement when they invested originally.
octoberfranklin 1 hour ago||
So nobody except AI labs is allowed to do "data governance"?
rangledangle 1 hour ago||
We've reached the era of "good enough" ai, it seems. The truth is you don't need the best model in most cases.
combyn8tor 1 hour ago|
I feel like "good enough" was reached around Opus 4.6 - 4.8. All I wanted after that is improved speed, continued tweaks to the tooling to get the most out of it and quality of life features added.
efields 56 minutes ago|||
That's where I am too. Opus 5.5 but increasingly faster is a future I'm hoping for.
IshKebab 40 minutes ago|||
It depends on your domain. In mine we didn't reach good enough until Opus 5.5/Astra.
pluc 58 minutes ago||
You have to use Windows, Teams and Copilot; how many people did I just lose?
matsemann 40 minutes ago||
Wouldn't mind if people at Microsoft actually dogfed themselves Windows. It's as if the designers and PMs all use a Mac and screw up everything.

Windows 11 shipped with a broken task bar, couldn't even ungroup items. No power users was ever involved in this.

leptons 20 minutes ago||
The first things I install on Windows 11 are OpenShell and ExplorerPatcher to get rid of their crap taskbar and start menu and bring back the Windows 10 taskbar and start menu. What they did with Windows 11 is an abomination.
pjmlp 49 minutes ago|||
Gamedevs are still around.
ihsw 27 minutes ago||
[dead]
luisgvv 35 minutes ago|||
Gets my work done... I know there are better tools but at the end of the day I get my paycheck
Cyan488 40 minutes ago||
> Windows, Teams and Copilot

"Fine. Please no. I'm out..." in that order

daishi55 51 minutes ago|
AFAIK there is no such explicit, company-wide effort at meta. The article seems to try to slip Meta in there with whatever reporting they are doing on Microsoft, despite there being no such evidence for meta.

To also add an important context to the drop in Claude code users reported for meta - this elides that we are absolutely still using the Anthropic models full steam ahead, but are moving towards internal interfaces and harnesses.

So I would question if that 50% drop in CC users is more of an interface change than anything else.

I for one have stopped explicitly using codex or CC entirely. But the interfaces I am using still use those harnesses under the hood. I wonder how that is counted.

More comments...