Microsoft and Meta scale back internal use of Anthropic's Claude, according to The Information

Meta and Microsoft, two of Anthropic's biggest corporate customers, are asking their employees to use less Claude and more of their own AI tools, The Information reported on Monday.

Earlier this year, Microsoft projected that it would spend at least $1 billion on its own internal use of Anthropic's technology. It has since lowered that figure by more than a third, after asking staff to use less Claude to save costs and to spend more time on Microsoft's homegrown AI tools. The figure does not include what customers spend on Anthropic models through Microsoft's tools, which has risen steadily.

At Meta, the number of employees using Claude Code (Anthropic's coding assistant) has dropped to about 30,000, from about 60,000 earlier this year. According to the same outlet, the spring layoffs, which affected about 10% of the workforce, explain part of the drop, but the main reason is the push for its own tools: MetaCode, built for internal use only, has passed 30,000 users, and Muse Code, its alternative to Claude Code powered by Meta models, has more than 6,000 internal users.

None of the three companies has publicly confirmed the report so far. The Information sees it as a challenge for Anthropic as it tries to sustain its rapid growth.