YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Meta and Microsoft take steps to reduce employee usage of Claude AI

103 points speckx 1 hour ago 107 comments

rfgplk 1 hour ago | parent

So they're going to fall even further behind? Buying puts on Meta and Microsoft, or even better might give it to Fable to handle it for me

outside1234 1 hour ago | parent

Microsoft is only limiting employees to $10k a month, down from $100k a month. :)

oofbey 25 minutes ago | parent

Absurd

bitexploder 1 hour ago | parent

Microsoft is like $100bn deep into OpenAI.

iAMkenough 1 hour ago | parent

I hope leadership isn’t susceptible to falling for the sunk cost fallacy.

RealityVoid 1 hour ago | parent

Who's ahead, again? Do they have a moat, or just a nice field?

pixelesque 57 minutes ago | parent

Maybe a "ha-ha".

gonzalohm 1 hour ago | parent

This may be seen as radical. But I think AI tools should be paid by the employee. After all, you should know how to do your work without AI.

Jagerbizzle 1 hour ago | parent

I could still do my job by typing all code into notepad, but companies don't charge employees for their IDE usage for a reason.

watwut 1 hour ago | parent

Employer pays tools used for work. Whether they are used to speed up work or to make it possible.

frisbm 1 hour ago | parent

"employees should foot the bill for tools that directly benefit their billion dollar employers"

kittomic 1 hour ago | parent

Should they pay for their pipelines too?

After all, they should know how to compile their software. Any automation of that process is cheating their employer.

bayindirh 1 hour ago | parent

If my employer is not forcing me to use a tool and gives me freedom, I'll be perfectly OK to use my own tools which I bought with my own money.

If my employer is putting scoreboards to see and champion who uses a tool which costs money to use, they shall pay for the tool.

Sorry, I'm not a ladder climber, yet I'm not mindless enough to bankrupt myself.

iAMkenough 1 hour ago | parent

I’d love it if I could bring my own computer to do my work, rather than be stuck with garbage hardware because of an enterprise agreement.

Avicebron 1 hour ago | parent

I don't understand your logic, why would an employee pay for a tool their employer wants them to use?

NewJazz 52 minutes ago | parent

Yeah that only makes sense if they are a freelancer/contractor.

robotburrito 1 hour ago | parent

The forklift should just be paid for by the employee. After all they should be strong enough to do work without one.

basiliobeltran 1 hour ago | parent

I am fine with that if I can keep the time saved for my personal use.

hypfer 48 minutes ago | parent

Nah. Work provides the tools.

An LLM is not too dissimilar to a Work Laptop or an IDE license.

ungovernableCat 32 minutes ago | parent

You're opening yourself up to data right and privacy risks with that. My company demands that I use their enterprise account because they can claim full ownership of all produced output and have full logs of every interaction.

I think that gets legally murky, if the employee is the one who pays for the tool.

outside1234 16 minutes ago | parent

In California this would mean the employee would own the IP -- or at least it would be murky -- and companies and lawyers don't like murky.

wrxd 12 minutes ago | parent

Sure. Should I also pay rent for my desk at the office?

Benard-dev 1 hour ago | parent

This is not surprising. Every big lab blocks competitor tools for internal use; it is a data governance thing, not a quality statement.

jvanderbot 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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.

NewJazz 54 minutes ago | parent

Does MS have coding models?

mattm 52 minutes ago | parent

This is likely the future as well. Down the road, every company will have their own internal coding models.

octoberfranklin 44 minutes ago | parent

So nobody except AI labs is allowed to do "data governance"?

WaltPurvis 23 minutes ago | parent

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.

waffletower 1 hour ago | parent

I should probably know more about Claude's TOS, but it is probably a mistake for these companies not to leverage the plausible deniability of their usage and turn it into a massive distillation resource for their own models.

bpodgursky 1 hour ago | parent

Limited to $10,000/employee/month lol. This is just to cut off a few people doing absurd things with low ROI. Don't read too much into it.

smy20011 1 hour ago | parent

That's what you got from 200$ claude sub.

whiplash451 54 minutes ago | parent

OTOH "$105 million to Claude Code over a 28-day timeframe"

$1.4B/year is not a small number, even at Meta's scale, when it's money going to a competitor

MisterMunchkin 1 hour ago | parent

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.

sergiotapia 1 hour ago | parent

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 45 minutes ago | parent

Not sure it's even possible to catch up by distilling.

vablings 1 hour ago | parent

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 59 minutes ago | parent

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.

n4r9 54 minutes ago | parent

What do sorry points mean anymore.

SOLAR_FIELDS 49 minutes ago | parent

Did they ever have meaning? It's always been a nebulous feels term

Terr_ 43 minutes ago | parent

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 7 minutes ago | parent

For forecasting what, if not man-hours?

senko 38 minutes ago | parent

I love the typo.

btown 27 minutes ago | parent

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.

Insimwytim 11 minutes ago | parent

Metrics of how sorry they are that they're forced to use LLMs.

Measured in sorry points.

P.S. Sorry, couldn't resist.

cyanydeez 51 minutes ago | parent

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.

proxyscore 6 minutes ago | parent

So you are going to blame this one that dev?

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

weinzierl 5 minutes ago | parent

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?

usaar333 39 minutes ago | parent

> 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 36 minutes ago | parent

True. I always Opus to pay for itself if it wants to get used by me.

perching_aix 38 minutes ago | parent

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 20 minutes ago | parent

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 14 minutes ago | parent

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.

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.

funnym0nk3y 29 minutes ago | parent

Sorry, but that is nonsense. Compared to opus haiku doesn't cut it most of the time.

hatthew 19 minutes ago | parent

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.

password54321 54 minutes ago | parent

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 15 minutes ago | parent

And yours is a 4 year old hype account?

password54321 10 minutes ago | parent

Nah, I just respond to a few things here and there.

righthand 17 minutes ago | parent

My thoughts were the reckoning would come when Infra teams started offloading AWS usage to LLMs and ended up token maxing and deploy maxing.

lenerdenator 16 minutes ago | parent

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.

woah 9 minutes ago | parent

$200 a month is too expensive yet they employ human developers?

platinumrad 7 minutes ago | parent

Corporations pay API rates.

cpncrunch 4 minutes ago | parent

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.

dyauspitr 7 minutes ago | parent

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

ashleyn 1 hour ago | parent

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.

tinza123 39 minutes ago | parent

Microsoft?

ihuman 35 minutes ago | parent

Copilot

NewJazz 28 minutes ago | parent

That's not a model.

therein 11 minutes ago | parent

If you ask Microsoft, it is a lifestyle.

ihuman 8 minutes ago | parent

True, but its not pure OpenAI GPT. If the point is dogfooding, then they'd use Copilot instead of using OpenAI's models directly

wffurr 9 minutes ago | parent

Meanwhile https://www.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1wh0qxq/google_fi...

nwhnwh 6 minutes ago | parent

What in the world is happening?

ActorNightly 8 minutes ago | parent

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.

nateglims 7 minutes ago | parent

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.

techdmn 1 hour ago | parent

I assume that at shops that both employ engineers and are developing an AI product, internal usage is not about improving productivity, it is about improving the offering. Of course they want employees to use internal tools.

rietta 1 hour ago | parent

Maybe I am slow here and everyone is using Claude with credits at max use. But isn't Claude Teams like $25/month per developer for ordinary use? What the heck of these guys doing that makes it get that phenomenally expensive for their use cases? These are presumably well capable engineers who started to use this as an aid right not just throw Fable at everything and loop to the max?

catchnear4321 1 hour ago | parent

Team plan has a seat limit.

science4sail 46 minutes ago | parent

You should read Gas Town: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

There are people out there building AI building orchestrators for orchestrators for orchestrators for agents. The author of that blog post later claimed to be spending the equivalent of $122k/month on tokens (by rotating their usage between 21 accounts).

As far as I can tell, the only thing that this level of spend has produced so far is an indie 2D RPG video game.

chroma_zone 12 minutes ago | parent

Correction: maintenance of an indie 2D RPG game that had existed for a few decades already.

tom_ 11 minutes ago | parent

The RPG long predates Gas Town.

Regarding Gas Town, see also https://yegge.ai/essays/the-shape-of-things-to-come/ :

> Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw

I hadn't seen the $122K figure mentioned previously. $87K for API-style pricing was mentioned in the above post, and ~$2,800/mo for multiple Claude Max accounts:

> My solution has been to create a token tap on $200 Max accounts, which for me work out to ~30x the list-price equivalent. So in reality I'm only spending about $2800/month out of pocket for my $87k "worth" of tokens. Though that number keeps growing alarmingly.

(He never seemed to provide numbers for Gas Town initially, whether what he paid, or what the API-style pricing would have charged, so it was interesting to get some actual figures. Sounds like a lot to me, but if he's genuinely getting multiple people's-worth of work out of it, then...)

(Also in the article: a little morsel of Emacs content, which was nice to see.)

meindnoch 9 minutes ago | parent

Is the game even good?

dannyw 18 minutes ago | parent

If you’re a large company you gotta pay API rates basically. Team plans exclude a lot of governance/IdP stuff and have a cap on seats too.

raincom 1 hour ago | parent

Large companies will take the same route as Meta and Microsoft. Small players will go for local LLMs with the right hardware.

VladDanGeorgesc 58 minutes ago | parent

It may bei cost efficient, but is it wise? We use not only the big US models, but also Chinese ones. This way we can compare who makes the difference. Simplified: Knowledge comes before economic aspects.

rangledangle 58 minutes ago | parent

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 18 minutes ago | parent

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.

vld_chk 57 minutes ago | parent

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.

binlog 52 minutes ago | parent

Meta was #1 by far

watwut 46 minutes ago | parent

Well that explains the limitation.

simonw 44 minutes ago | parent

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.

krauses 48 minutes ago | parent

In other news, the CIA is limiting it's employees from submitting top secret information on KGB owned and operated websites.

simonw 46 minutes ago | parent

This story is re-published from https://cybersecuritynews.com/meta-microsoft-claude-ai/ (it credits that source at the bottom) but with the internal links removed.

The cybersecuritynews.com news one simply republishes details of a story published by The Information. At least they have the decency to LINK to that Information story:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/meta-microsoft-work-...

... and of course the Information story is behind a paywall.

jiraiyasarutobi 41 minutes ago | parent

Muse Spark 1.3 Max is quite good for almost all of my usecases and its cheap.

cute_boi 17 minutes ago | parent

isn't it cheap till if you allow them to use your data?

rdtsc 35 minutes ago | parent

CEO's nephew showed him how good the Chinese models are?

I am only half joking, I heard something like "my son or nephew did this cool thing with $X so we'll take $this_radical_step because of it" enough times over my career.

lumost 29 minutes ago | parent

There is a perceived opportunity cost from someone using a lower-tier model on their task. What if the better model did a "better" job? what if my trials and tribulations are due to model quality?

If you are used to talking to opus5.5 medium, going to GPT6.1 luna low will feel like a step down. Why would any employee take the (personal) risk?

irishcoffee 29 minutes ago | parent

Wait, what? We pretended this tech would save the world and it won’t? Oh man.

throwitaway222 16 minutes ago | parent

> 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 13 minutes ago | parent

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.

grebc 8 minutes ago | parent

Very likely a negative multiplier.

oldmanhorton 12 minutes ago | parent

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).

antisthenes 7 minutes ago | parent

That's a shame. Microsoft's W11 quality disaster might have actually been improved with a frontier model.

Or maybe not, but the bar was set pretty low that going all-in on AI might have been worth it.