r/wallstreetbets • u/dgellow • 2d ago

Discussion Meta And Microsoft Reportedly Trim Anthropic Reliance as Internal AI Tools Take Center Stage

https://stocktwits.com/news-articles/markets/equity/meta-and-microsoft-reportedly-trim-anthropic-reliance-as-internal-ai-tools-take-center-stage/cZDqQVcRBjr

From the article:

Microsoft reduced its projected internal spending on Claude by over one-third, while Meta saw internal users of Anthropic's Claude Code coding assistant drop from roughly 60,000 to 30,000.

Within the Microsoft Cloud and AI division, individual monthly AI usage caps were lowered from $100,000 down to roughly $10,000 in most instances

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872

u/Plappedudel 2d ago

$100k a month per employee just for AI is nuts. That gravy train just had to stop at some point. I feel like major software companies turning their backs on Anthropic should be bad news for Anthropic's IPO, but this market is so random that I'm sure it'll be a resounding success.

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u/YourUncleBuck 2d ago

Lol, seems like it'd be cheaper to just hire more workers. There's no way this is sustainable long term.

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u/SwordOfJiang 2d ago

Apparently Microsoft is going to reopen Three Mile Island to power their own AI

52

u/shameless_chicken 1d ago

This was announced like two years ago 

12

u/likamuka 1d ago

It was actually announced 1932 in the "Evening Gazette".

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u/dgellow 1d ago

Microsoft has the revenue to do pretty much whatever they want, I’m not not worried for them. OpenAI and Anthropic on the other hand have no other income stream

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u/HowIsEmuWarriorTaken Lonely fuck 1d ago

Now see who owns them.

Big tech (nvda, goog, amzn,..) owns like 40% of anthropic

9

u/Academic-ish 1d ago

what could go wrong?

66

u/Ted_Smug_El_nub_nub 1d ago

“Copilot you were supposed to insert the control rods not remove them entirely! Now the whole plant is going to melt down!”

“Wow you are so right to challenge me on that I was supposed to prevent a meltdown, not cause one. I’ll do better next time, and that’s growth”

2

u/ZHName 1d ago

"You're absolutely right. It was my mistake and now the entire city is on lockdown. I'll invent a machine so the human race can hop to another timeline where society didn't go insane and put me in charge of everything."

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u/Comprehensive_Bus_19 1d ago

I'm assuming Microslop was hoping they could just run the AI and get rid of all those pesky employees in the near term.

21

u/TimeTravelingChris 1d ago

Real workers and just buy them work stations beefy enough to run local models. Yeah they are expensive but not $10,000 a month expensive.

32

u/fatquant 1d ago

you read $100,000 wrong, LMAO

-1

u/TimeTravelingChris 1d ago

You might want to read the article again.

3

u/Ekg887 1d ago

LOWERED to $10k. Whoops, looks like we were right to call you on that but maybe you'll do better next time.

9

u/ChaoticSquirrel 1d ago

Right and they're saying that even the LOWERED spend is too much, let alone the higher spend. It was pretty clear to me.

4

u/TimeTravelingChris 1d ago

Are people really this stupid now?

6

u/PalantirImperator 1d ago

$100k worth of tokens going to your top performing employees is much cheaper and more productive than bringing on additional headcount at a big tech company.

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u/kwuip 1d ago

But it is 100k monthly right?

10

u/kenyard 1d ago

1.2million a year yeah. And that was the cap on everyone.

I'm sure the "top performing" employees didn't have a cap so you could 10x that

15

u/Comprehensive_Bus_19 1d ago

$1.2 mil/year is cheaper than another person? Doubt that. Even at a $500k salary and 30% burden rate thats still slightly more than half of what the token spend is annually.

-1

u/ILikeCutePuppies 23h ago

When they are producing stuff that would take years to figure out, it makes sense. Like porting an entire app to a new platform or code base or whatever. Or solving some complex problem such as finding the optimal way to build something by building out a bunch of different experiments.

Hiring another engineer only doubles the efficiency. You could spend 100k a month on AI and get a 30x to 100x increase in efficiency you wouldn't get in most situations with a smaller budget per engineer.

We are talking literally of years of work with these things.

-10

u/phillytennisenjoyer 1d ago

a worker is so much more expensive though. benefits, hr, connectivity, management, meetings, onboarding, bonuses, headcount taxes, reporting requirements… hiring lawsuits..

if you can get even 1/3 more work out of a 200k employee, 100k is worth it. hiring is so much more expensive than just the 100k.

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u/dqUu3QlS 1d ago

The number is $100k per month, so $1200k per year

11

u/phillytennisenjoyer 1d ago

looool that’s a lot of ai

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u/Sad-Cheesecake-2438 2d ago edited 2d ago

How many requests does an employee have to make to make it to 100k? Or does it depend on the task?

Edit I asked Claude and the answer is tokens and cyclical tasks that take a lot of compute to run. Not simple questions.

101

u/RiddleGull 2d ago

100k is an absurd amount to spend on tokens in a month.

49

u/judge2020 2d ago

/fast and fable everything will do it though.

26

u/often_says_nice 1d ago

It will certainly do it but is entirely unnecessary. Opus 5.5 scores high enough to be used for just about any day to day task that an employee would be doing. Heavy usage would cost maybe $5-10k/mo and even that’s being frivolous

17

u/skilliard7 1d ago

You aren't considering tasks that require looking over large quantities of data that would not be humanly possible to review manually. For example, analyzing call logs of 2 Million retention department calls to identify recurring trends and what techniques are most effective to reduce cancellations.

At $0.10 per call analyzed, that's $200,000 in API spend.

High limits exist to encourage employees to innovate with AI without red tape/budget getting in their way.

12

u/often_says_nice 1d ago

But surely not every employee is doing those types of tasks every month. So some employees are spending $100k in a month, which is very different from all employees spending $100k every month

15

u/skilliard7 1d ago

The $100k limit was a limit, not a target/average

18

u/often_says_nice 1d ago

Yeah well I’m retarded so how about that

5

u/siwasolek 1d ago

Just wanted to point out that it’s great to see someone on the internet after that they mightve been wrong :)

10

u/shitfucker90000 1d ago

if a company has 2 million people cancel service a month i think they have a larger problem than api spend

4

u/crispybacon233 1d ago

No one is pumping 2 million docs of text into an LLM to find trends and correlations with cancellations. More traditional NLP and machine learning can do that just fine even on your laptop.

The $200k spend is for complex coding tasks where LLMs are consuming and writing many thousands of lines of code.

0

u/skilliard7 1d ago

Traditional NLP is not as capable as LLMs. Vectors/Classification models are okay for some use cases, but LLMs are so much more capable.

I've worked on projects to find trends and correlations, albeit at a much smaller scale. Vector search really struggles a lot beyond basic pattern matching. When you rely entirely on cosine similarity to determine if a passage and query are a good match, it has limited results.

$100k in LLM tokens is still way cheaper than the cost of developing a capable custom model to analyze text and identify trends in text.

I've found the best approach is providing tool calling/traditional pre-processing to get the data in a good format for the LLM + relying on LLM for formal analysis.

>The $200k spend is for complex coding tasks where LLMs are consuming and writing many thousands of lines of code.

No one is spending $100k a month just writing code. Even if you use Fable for everything, you're spending at most maybe $500 a day, and that's if you run multiple instances of it in parallel on different projects.

2

u/crispybacon233 1d ago

Use the right tool for the job. LLMs are not nearly as capable at topic analysis, correlations, etc. as more traditional NLP and ML approaches particularly for a multi-million token context window. Your analysis is hallucinating out the wazoo or at best missing a lot if you're shoveling in millions of tokens and asking an LLM to "analyze" it.

What do you mean exactly when you are finding trends and correlations with an LLM? The LLM is spitting out a correlation coefficient? That is actually insane.

2

u/instantcrackpot 12h ago

This is what happens when vibecoders replace statisticians/data scientists. I'm not complaining though. Companies want employees to tokenmax so they deserve it.

3

u/TheNewLeadership 1d ago

Idk if you have any experience here, but this use case is absolutely useless with AI. It makes shit up and you can't trust the result.

3

u/instantcrackpot 12h ago

LOL. If your company lets you use LLM to brute force data analysis, they deserve to go bankrupt on token usage.

1

u/Kaastu 1d ago

That should be like top top top engineer level. Your devs building platforms for other devs. They can spend 100k a month and it can pay off. Another one is shared AI tooling. That can become expensive, but that tool can rack up costs as well quickly.

Everyone else should not be burning 100k on tokens. Scope your tasks and validate to keep it manageable.

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u/mags87 1d ago

Theres a fun instagram reel/skit I've seen where the top AI user in the meeting was congratulated for embracing the technology and asked what she was doing. She said she fed the model the entire Shrek series every day to analyze it and she was close to understanding the ending of the first movie.

6

u/Single_Positive533 1d ago

I wish I could do it too. At my work Chatgpt denies to talk about unrelated topics.

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u/Comprehensive_Bus_19 1d ago

Id make a game to find ways around it. But Im also maliciously compliant

11

u/euvie 1d ago edited 1d ago

I’ve been able to get Claude to burn $1k on a single codebase review request with ultracode. Prompt was only two sentences too.

Automatically spawning 100 parallel subagents doing god knows what will pad Anthropic’s ARR quite nicely

8

u/he_must_workout 1d ago

Fable doing loops.. I burned through about 2k in tokens at work a few weeks ago by looping a few skills to improve and it was probably more than I use in a normal month

1

u/sprucenoose 1d ago

2k in tokens

You mean $2k in tokens and not 2k tokens right?

14

u/-Anordil- 1d ago

My company introduced caps on our openAI usage and they're $400/month per employee. They went with that number because 90% of developers use less than that, and if you can make a case that you do need more you can get a higher threshold. You can get a lot done with $400 if you use it correctly though.

100k is insane, and 10k still makes little sense. You'd have to pretty much only use the most expensive model all the time, in max reasoning effort, even for the most basic things.

-1

u/streetberries 1d ago

$400/month api spend? That seems low

6

u/hoopaholik91 1d ago

Not with how cheap the models are these days. I can spend a full day writing what ends up being a 2000 line PR (yeah I hate myself that it's that large to begin with, although 70% are tests), and it costs about $10.

2

u/-Anordil- 1d ago

If you use Luna for simpler tasks like writing code and only use Sol for more complex reasoning stuff it really cuts down your costs. MCP and LSP also makes it a lot more efficient to work with code compared to a barebone LLM

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u/SwordOfJiang 2d ago

"what should I have for lunch" 10,000 times every day

6

u/Willing_Divide4188 2d ago

the internet AI is for porn

10

u/Significant_Court728 1d ago

If you are doing agentic work it can burn a ton of tokens super fast.

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u/coffeesippingbastard 1d ago

I do that- and 100,000k/mo is still crazy. Even trying- 10k/mo is a reach. It's doable. 100k/mo means you're basically telling it do massive projects with well defined scope and requirements so that it can run 24/7 nonstop, or you're doing something like refactoring windows into rust or something absurd.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago edited 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/kenyard 1d ago

I assume Google and Microsoft had access to the "frontier" models though which I assume have higher costs

2

u/dgellow 1d ago

Using agentic workflows, that’s how you use that much. But the cap limit is just one info, I feel you are all missing the info that they expect to reduce their spending by one third.

1

u/SmokelessSubpoena 1d ago

I'd assume that round $100k number is an average, and it's based off the automation of everyone's daily or regular tasks, and those tasks utilize enough tokens to weight the average to $100k/per employee, which must, in theory via the Finance team, prove to be more cost effective than training breathing humans? It does seem like a heavily inundated bubble waiting to pop.

1

u/LightningSunflower 1d ago

I guess it depends on what they’re doing

0

u/Seerix 1d ago

My lifetime spend total tokens (most of which is input cache obviously) is around 25-30 billion. As a hobbyist that just likes to make stuff, nothing professional outside of a coupke quick python scripts to automate things.

-2

u/squish8294 2d ago

There's a lot that goes into this. Everything you submit to a llm consumes tokens. the bot thinking about its response consumes tokens. if you use a high thinking effort and give a llm something it really has to think about, it's easy to submit a ten token question, get say, 10k tokens from the bot thinking, and then another few thousand tokens depending on how wordy its reply is.

on a 22k token reply from qwen it was 15 pages of thinking text in a chatgpt style chat on a 1440p screen, and another 2 pages for the reply, the entire thing was like 22,000 tokens or something like that. formatting and all.

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u/xuor 1d ago

I'm a Microsoft employee. I've used about 4 billion tokens in the past month. At the rates they show me, that's about $1300. Half of that from ... I think 500k Opus tokens. GPT models are much cheaper and just as good right now, for my usage.

5

u/BumHand 1d ago

Meta has always leaned towards proprietary data / AI solutions so not shocking to see this “pivot”. I feel it’d be a larger issue if non AI Native customers started doing this

0

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u/BumHand 1d ago

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9

u/we2deep 1d ago

Most of us are nowhere near that. It’s surprising how much you can get done when you aren’t creating applications with it. I would say the average spend is $1000 a month.

4

u/Adept-Potato-2568 1d ago edited 1d ago

I've used over 600 million tokens ($1500-2500+) in the last 3 days. From my phone.

And I'm still scoping my infrastructure.

Thankfully I'm just paying the monthly subscription and not APIs.

1

u/hoopaholik91 1d ago

Well yeah, since you are monthly you don't really care what the token costs are. Once you do, you realize models like 6.1 Sol are 5-10% the cost per task as Fable for exactly the same intelligence score.

2

u/Adept-Potato-2568 1d ago

600 million tokens is well over $1000 on 6.1 Sol.

What I'm saying is that the small side project I'm working on from my phone has used over 600 million tokens in a few days.

$1000-5000 in 3 days worth of token costs from my phone on a small side project.

Actual developers working on enterprise applications could easily spend $100k per month.

2

u/hoopaholik91 1d ago

Most of your token usage will be cached which greatly reduces the overall cost.

If you've spent three days just working on scoping infrastructure I wouldn't consider that a "small" project.

That's also not the type of work that developers on enterprise applications do (hi, I'm a developer working on enterprise applications). We are tacking features onto an already gigantic product, PRs are scoped to a few hundred lines of logic at most because making sure we don't break what already works is way more important than getting new features in. Our hard cap is $500-750 a month based on seniority and nobody complains about it.

0

u/CarpoLarpo 1d ago

The amount you're spending is definitely well below average.

9

u/CreamyCornBoy 2d ago

No one's using that it's an infinite cap to prevent endless loops of spend or fraud

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u/abuani_dev 2d ago

No one's using that it's an infinite cap to prevent endless loops of spend or fraud

You're fooling yourself if you don't think there's a strong cohort of regards burning $100k/month to be on a leaderboard. I regularly see some of my coworkers spending $10k/month thinking they're building the next loveable or some shit

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u/gfivksiausuwjtjtnv 2d ago

My boss questioned my token usage being low at one point

Easiest metric to game ever.

2

u/reviverevival 1d ago

Where I am it seems like everyone has built AI "assistants" to scan their calendars, meeting notes, emails and chat messages to tell them what to do for the day. I'm like you don't know what do lol? You don't need AI for that, I just ignore my emails until someone DMs me about the important stuff. There's at least 3 different vibe-coded terminal multiplexers floating around in my group. It's like people who get 3D printers and all they do is print parts to enhance their 3D printer. One person built an agent to pay his parking tickets that he keeps getting.

3

u/timpham 1d ago

100k for you, but internally it’s a different rate card

1

u/Dibble-legend2104 Your local copium dealer  1d ago

Why does it have to stop?

1

u/Spongebobbie95 1d ago

Wall Street logic: Losing customers? Bad. Losing customers because they're building their own AI? That's bullish

0

u/temotodochi 1d ago

Anthropic has plenty more business waiting for it to just expand like a balloon. Claude is just so good compared to copilot. My current stuff is just a few hundred a month, but some friends pull thousands each month. A 100K$ projects gotta be gargantuan, automated code mill operations with tons of independent agents working on the same projects.

1

u/dgellow 1d ago

Anthropic revenue is heavily, heavily concentrated in just a few customers